LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. | 

Shelf _.._t-^'7 o« 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ^ 



Mr. Donnelly's Reviewers 



WILLIAM D. O'CONNOR. 




1889. 

CHICAGO, NEW YORK, SAN' FRANCISCO, 
BKLI'ORD, CI.ARKK & CO. 



C^ 






COP^-RIGHT BV 

W. D. O'CONNOR, 

1880. 



DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY, 

printers and binders, 

Chicago. 



mote: 



Ifn ^emoriam. 



During the progress of these pages through the 
press, the author, William D. O'Connor, Assistant 
General Superintendent of the Life-Saving Service, 
passed suddenly away from the conflicts and contro- 
versies of life. He had suffered for a long time 
from partial paralysis. He was regarded as a con- 
firmed sufferer, and the announcement of his death 
at Washington on the morning of May 9, 188/, 
came as a sad surprise to a wide circle of admiring 
friends. Mr. O'Connor was an enthusiast in the 
work in which he was engaged. He was very proud 
of his department of the Government service, and 
often spoke hopefully of a time when shipwrecks 
on the American coast would be almost impossible. 

There can be no doubt that if Mr. O'Connor had 
devoted himself wholly to literature he would have 
made more than a connnon mark. As it is, he has 
left behind him more than one powerful contribu- 
tion to the current controversy on the Baconian 
authorship of the " Shakspearean plays." He took 
issue with the late Richard Grant White on this 
question, and made most chivalrous appeals in 



1 



defense of Delia Bacon and Mrs. Potts. Of " Ham- 
let's Note-book," one of his most effective pieces of 
work, a critic says: ''This book — whether one 
believes in Bacon as the author of ' Shakspeare's 
Plays ' or not — is as fine a piece of rhetorical special 
pleading as the annals of controversial literature 
will show." 

These pages, the last literary effort of his life, 
prove how earnestly he could champion a cause, 
how steadfastly he could defend a man whom he 
thought to have been unfairly dealt with. 

Speaking of Mr. O'Connor's personal qualities, 
Mr. Henry Latchford says : 



'*From time to time, in the afternoon, I called 
at his office in the Treasury Building, and helped 
him down stairs and to the street cars on Pennsyl- 
vania avenue. He always had something delight- 
fully original to say on any subject I 

had heard O'Connor spoken of in Dublin, London, 
Paris and Boston as 'a spirit finely touched.' It is 
almost impossible to describe the charm of his 
presence, his character, his voice, grey eyes, silken 
yellow hair and his wonderful conversation. But it 
is possible for those of us who knew him to say 
that when so much high endeavor, such splendid 
intellect, such wide sympathies, and such a gentle 
voice have been embodied in one human being, the 
death of this rare person means that * there has 
passed away a glory from the earth."* 



Mr. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
I. 

In the opening pages of the little volume on 
Bacon-Shakespeare matters, entitled Hamle{!s Note- 
Book^ which the present writer published a couple of 
years ago, the question was raised whether reviews 
are of an}^ real advantage to literature — whether 
they are not, on the contrary, a serious detriment, 
mainly because the}^ have the power, through the 
facile medium of current journals and periodicals, to 
give a book a bad name in advance, and, by deterring 
readers, either absolutely prevent or greatly delay 
its recognition. Just in proportion to the depth or 
worth of the book, is this what is likely to hap- 
pen to it. 

The case under consideration at the time Avas 
that of Mrs. Constance M. Pott's edition of the 
Promus^ Avhich, until then, had been Lord Bacon's 
only unpublished manuscript. As such, it was of 
evident value, but it had become doubly so because 
Mrs. Pott had illustrated its sixteen hundred sen- 
tences by parallel passages from the Shakespeare 
drama, nearly all of which were plainly in relation, 
and a great number actually identical in thought and 
terms. As the Proimts was a private note-book of 
Bacon's, antedating most of the plays, and as the man 
William Shakspere, could not possibly have had 
access to it, the significance of the coincidences estab- 
lished by the parallels in such quantities is n]V):n'eiit 



8 MR. DONXELLY'S REVIEWERS. 

to ail}' candid mind, and the book was, therefore, of 
exceptional importance. Nevertheless, Mr. Eichard 
Grant AVIiite so reviewed it in the Atlantic 31onthly 
when it appeared, as to create the conviction, aided 
by the journals which followed his lead, that it was a 
work of lunacy, and to actually arrest its circu- 
lation. At the time he did this, he himself, as I have 
had since the best authority for knowing, had 
become a secret convert to the Baconian theory, and 
despised and loathed the Stratford burgher with a 
sort of rancor ^ — a fact which his papers on the 
Anatomization of tHutkespeare sufficiently indicate. 
The lack of international copyright as an existing 
evil, is less to be mourned than the cold-hearted sur- 
render of literature to the tribe of Jack the Ripper, 
involved in cases like these. There are bitter hours 
when we could well yearn for the spacious days 
when authors had only to get past the official cen- 
sorship, bad as it was, and face the free judgment of 
the public, without the perennial intervention of the 
gangs of ignorant and impudent men, self-styled 
reviewers. It was that warm, spontaneous, disinter- 
ested popular judgment that gave welcome to the 
works we know as Cervantes and Calderon, Dante 
and Rabelais, Moliere and Shakespeare, and saw 
them securely lodged in eternal favor, before any 
banded guild of detraction could exist to fret their 
authors' spirits, check their genius, or lessen them 
beforehand in public interest and honor. AVhat 
would the modern reviewers have done to them? 

The worthlessness of the critical verdicts of this 
century, in which they first began, is measured by 
the fame of the works they once assailed. It would 



MR. DONXELLY'S REVIEWERS. ♦ 9 

be difficult to name any cardinal book that upon its 
appearance was not belittled, censured or condemned 
by the literary authorities of the periodicals. Every 
one of the great British poets, from Scott to Tenny- 
son, had to run the gauntlet of abuse and denial, and 
received his meed of praise, after long waiting, only 
from the slow justice of the common reader. It is 
true that the intelligent critics who disparaged and 
reviled the entire galaxy, including Keats, Shelley, 
Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron, closed up with 
astonishing unanimity in roaring eulogy on Alex- 
ander Smith, who certainly was a memorable geyser 
of splendid metaphors, but is now almost forgotten. 
In France, Victor Hugo, altogether supreme among 
the geniuses of modern Europe, an instance almost 
unexampled in literature of demiurgic power and 
splendor, was so derided and denounced for years by 
these men, that at one time, so George Sand tells us, 
he nearly resolved in his despair to lay down his pen 
forever. George Sand herself, the greatest without 
exception of all the women that ever wrote, whose 
works have changed the tone of the civilized world 
in respect to womankind, and who has insensibly 
altered every statute book in Europe and America 
in favor of her sex, was for many years, and is even 
at times now, seen only through the reviewers' tem- 
pestuous veiling of mud for darkness and bilge water 
for rain. Her great romance, Consuelo^ which, were 
the image not too small, might be compared for 
purity to the loveliest new-blown rose, glittering 
with the dew of dawn — a book whose central char- 
acter is the very essence of noble womanliness, 
kindred in art to Murillo's Virgin — was made for 



10 MR. DOXNELL T'S RE VIE WEES. 

years the very s3^nonym of infamy. Her exquisite 
id}^ of village life in France, La petite Fadette^ I 
saw once in translation here disguised under the 
title of Fanclion^ and the author's name withheld 
from the title page — all for the sake of decency ! In 
one of her novels, Lelia^ she makes her beautiful 
heroine, after talking to her lover purely and elo- 
quently of the celestial nature of love, draw his 
head to her bosom and press upon it her sacred 
kisses ; and I am told that an apparently true born 
reviewer, one of her latest French critics, evidently a 
moral demon, the academician Caro— refers to this 
incident as a sample of what he calls her '^ sensual 
ideality," and holds it up as something dripping 
with offense and stench and horror ! The critical de- 
traction of the marvelous Balzac delayed his success 
until late in life, and the vital and life-giving dra- 
matic creations of the elder Dumas, with their extra- 
ordinary and recondite research, their measureless 
exuberance of invention, and the unique, jovial 
humor they have as a distinct element, were ignored 
or mocked by the mandarins long after their quali- 
ties had made them dear to the whole reading world. 
'^o variety of books has escaped the injury of this 
fool system, which sets mediocrity or malignity to 
arbitrate over talent or genius. Every one can 
remember the reception given to Buckle's History of 
Civilization^ a w^ork of diversified and enormous 
learning, of fresh and noble views into the life of 
nations like the opening of new vistas, and among 
its great merits the qualit}^, inestimable in a book, 
of breaking up that narcolepsia which even the best 
reading will induce^ and rousing and holding in 



MR, DONNELLY'S REYIEWEB8. 11 

animation the mind of the peruser. The misrepresent- 
ation and detraction heaped upon it by the critical 
prints were profuse and incessant until the appear- 
ance of the second volume, when its author turned 
upon his assailants in a lengthy foot note, and like a 
gallant bull gored an Edinburgh reviewer in a way 
to make the matadors and picadors alike wary. 
Who can forget the foaming assaults of the army of 
reviewing boobies and bigots through which Darwin 
at length swept in victory to his triumph and his 
rest behind the rampart of his proud, immortal tomb 
in the old abbey ? On the poetry of Walt Whit- 
man, in which Spirituality appears as the animating 
soul, creating and permeating every word and every 
line, as it does every detail, gross or delicate, of the 
natural world, and whose simple grandeur has 
entered the spirits of all who are greatest in Europe 
and this country, the current criticism w^as long, and 
until recently, nothing but a storm of brutal pas- 
quinades. As one looks back and sees, by the ulti- 
mate triumph of the sterling books in every 
instance, upon what paltry and fictitious pretenses 
the indictments upon them must have been made, 
it becomes more and more a marvel that such an 
abominable order of tribunals should have ever come 
into vogue or been so long tolerated. 

II. 

The latest example in point is the treatment which 
Mr. Donnelly's extraordinary work, The Great Cryp- 
togram^ has received from the critics of a number of 
our leading journals. So much has already been 
said that it is not necessary to more than briefl\" 



12 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWEBS. 

describe the character of this volume. Although 
nearly a thousand pages in length, it has, by the 
general admission of its readers, an absorbing inter- 
est. The first half contains a formidable argument, 
supported at every point by copious facts, against 
Shakspere as the author of the drama aflBliated 
upon his name, and in favor of Lord Bacon ; and 
whatever may be its flaws or defects, every sensible 
and unbiased mind will consider it masterly. The 
second part is devoted to the exhibition of the nar- 
rative wdiich Mr. Donnelly asserts was interwoven 
by Bacon, word by Avord, through the text of the 
plays. This, so far as the extracts of it given can 
show, is to be Bacon's autobiography^; comprising the 
history of his relation to the actor and manager 
Shakspere and to the Shakespeare dramas; to 
the life of the Elizabethan court ; and to the uni- 
multiplex transactions of his time. Of course, 
though sufficiently ample, a comparatively small 
part of the marvelous tale is given, for the reason 
that the labor of a number of years, which even 
the worst enemies of the book concede to have been 
stupendous in patience and dihgence, did not enable 
Mr. Donnelly to completely decipher more; and it 
was to enable himself to finish the work he had 
begun on two interlocking plays that, forced into 
print, he decided for prudential reasons connected 
with the preservation of his copyright to withhold 
the basic or root numbers of the cipher for the 
present. With this reservation, the book, perfectly 
unanswerable in its main argument, was published, 
and at once, and before it could get to the public, 
the reviewers of several journals of enormous 



MR. BONj^ELLY'S REVIEWERS. 13 

circulation and great popular credit fell upon it pell- 
mell. The pretext given for its critical demolition 
was that the primary numbers of the cipher had 
been withheld; and hence it was assumed or argued 
that Mr. Donnelh^ must be, at least, a victim of 
unconscious cerebration or a lunatic, but moreprob- 
bly and reasonably a fraud, a forger, a cheat, a liar, 
a swindler and a scoundrel. The singular and strik- 
ing narrative he had extricated from the text of the 
pla^^s was declared to be nothing but a cento ob- 
tained by picking out the words he Avanted and 
stringing them together as he chose, without any 
logical connection with the figures he paraded. The 
brave zealots for the truth who thus exposed him in 
all his hideous moral deformity, ignored, what any 
merely thoughtful or candid person would have 
observed, that, although the basic numbers of the 
cipher had been withheld, the working numbers 
which remained showed a uniformity and limitation, 
which made the idea of imposture not only impossible 
but perfectly ridiculous, and at the very least, cre- 
ated a tremendous presumption in favor of the reality 
and validity ofthe cryptogram. But the revilers, in 
their prepense determination to reduce to nothingness 
the results of years of weary toil, looked out of sight 
a still more important consideration. It is manifest 
thatj after all, a great mathematical problem must 
be decided by an adept in mathematics. If doubt 
exists in regard to the verity of a complex crypto- 
graph, none but a skilled cryptologist can resolve it. 
In the case under notice this had been done. Im- 
mediately upon the publication of the book Pi'o- 
fessor Colbert, a distinguished mathematician, 



lit, ^^R' DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 

having previously been admitted in confidence to a 
complete knowledge of all the laws and numbers of 
the cipher, disclosed or withheld, came out in a 
length}" article in the Chicago Tribune^ a journal of 
great distinction and circulation, and roundly certi- 
fied, without any qualification, to the absolute 
validity and reality of the cryptogram! In view of 
this decisive scientific judgment, coming from a 
source unaccused and inaccusable by even the most 
unscrupulous of the anti-Donnelly banditti, how^ 
could any one dare to call the verity and regularity 
of the cipher into question? And how^, in view of 
the decree of an authority like Professor Colbert, 
could even the most unprincipled and reckless of the 
patient scholar's abusers, have had the measureless 
brass to go the length of covering him with scurril 
epithets ? But the case against the dealers in stigma 
is even worse than as stated. At about the date of 
Professor Colbert's finding, Mr. Donnelly, who was 
then in London, consented, at the solicitation of Mr. 
Knowles, the editor of the Nineteenth Century 
magazine, a disinterested person, to submit the entire 
cipher to the judgment of a scientific expert, to be 
chosen by Mr. Knowles. The selection fell upon 
'Mr. George Parker Bidder, a Queen's Counsel, 
which is the highest grade of lawyers in Great 
Britain, and one of the most eminent mathema- 
ticians in England. After a careful study, Mr. 
Bidder reported that Mr. Donnell}^ had made a 
great and extraordinary discovery, and that, although 
the work was not without errors in execution, the 
existence of the cipher was undeniable. Here, then, 
w^as additional and incontestible proof that Mr. 



MR. DONNELL T'S RE VIE WERS. 15 

Donnelly's cryptogram was neither a delusion nor a 
fraud, but a reality. The finding rested now upon 
the perfect knowledge and unquestioned integrity of 
two eminent men, widely removed from each other. 
Under these circumstances it is nothing but folly or 
impudence in any reviewer to deny evidence w^hich 
is not based on opinion, but on certainty. The exis- 
tence of the Baconian cipher in the Shakespeare 
text, in view of the decision of persons who are 
authorities, is no longer a hypothesis ; it is a fact ! 
Suppose an astronomer should announce, simply by 
astronomical calculations based on certain phe- 
nomena, the existence and locality of a new planet, 
as Leverrier did in the case of the planet Neptune, 
subsequently found by Dr. Galle's telescope : a host 
of people might assert its non-existence, but if 
Laplace and Herschel said, " We have verified the 
calculations ; the star is there," doubt and debate 
would end, for the experts had spoken. Nothing 
after, but to wait until the lens made the discovery. 
The confirmations of astronomers as to the exis- 
tence of an undiscovered planet are no more 
decisive than those of cryptographers as to the 
existence of an uncompleted cipher. 

Subsequent to the decision of Messrs. Colbert and 
Bidder, two other eminent authorities, after examin- 
ation, rendered a similar judgment. One of them 
is Sir Joseph Neale McKenna, a distinguished crypt- 
ologist and member of Parliament ; at Dublin, the 
other the Count D'Eckstadt, a celebrated Austrian 
scholar and diplomat, all his life versed in secret 
writing as used in European courts. 



16 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 

Of the existence of the scientific decision, sup- 
porting the claims of the cipher, the reviewers were 
well aware, for it was widely pubhshed prior to 
their onslaughts. But what care they for decis- 
ions? The purpose of the flippant persifleur or 
the literary slasher holds against all oracles. These 
men would have denied algebra, and ''reviewed," 
without mercy, the Arab that devised it. 

III. 

I do not wish to include Professor Davidson 
among them. He was the first to put forth, in two 
columns of the ISTew York World (April 29th, '88), an 
adverse judgment on the cipher part of Mr. Don- 
nelly's book, and this was prior to the verdict of 
Professor Colbert and Mr. Bidder. Had he been 
aware of it, being one who knows what is due to a 
scientific decree, it might have arrested his action, 
which I am confident he will yet retract and be 
sorry for. I withhold an examination of his article, 
being content to remark that it is ma^nifestly wholly 
based on suppositions and assumptions, as the reader 
might have seen, and that these are not borne out 
by the facts,, as I happen to know. More, however, 
to be regretted than any of his badl\" -taken points is 
the haste with which he rushed into print to dis- 
credit Mr. Donnelly's volume. His article was 
dated April 29th, written, of course, at a date still 
earlier, and the book was issued on the 2d of May 
following. Thus, for at least three days before 
publication, he had a clear field with hundreds of 
thousands of readers, prejudicing them against the 
book, not only by his plausible statements, but by 



MR. D ONJSfELL Y'S RE VIE WERS. ir 

his personal distinction as a brilliant and learned 
man. The blow came from him with double force 
in view of the fact that he, more than anyone else, 
had advanced the credit of the cipher by his long 
and favorable provisional report, based upon a 
partial investigation in a former issue of The World, 
His later article had, therefore, all the effect of a 
formal retraction or palinode. This virtual change 
of front was surely astounding. Some persons have 
ascribed it to sheer timidity. It may be so, but I 
sincerely hope not. Certainly he showed valiancy 
enough when, in his extended report in The Woiid, 
he faced the bitter and silly Shaksperean prejudice, 
and threw just and favoring light in advance on 
Mr. Donnelly's magnificent discovery. It is said, 
however, that Marshal Saxe, queller of armies, 
would sink into what De Quincey and his English 
call, " a blue funk," and quake with terror if a mouse 
appeared in his private chamber; and it may be 
that at last, with the cipher before him not abso- 
lutely proved, and the mountain of Shakspereolatry 
in full throe on the horizon, Professor Davidson 
quailed at the prospect of the contemptible small 
derision that threatened to enter his cloister. 

Another critic who deserves to be noticed no 
less mildly than Professor Davidson, if only out of 
the respect due to misfortune, is Mr. John J. Jen- 
nings, who, at that time, on May 6th, occupied nearly 
three solid columns of the St. Louis Post-Despatch in 
the effort to establish that the Donnelly cipher is only 
a simple case of arithmetical progression ; that Mr. 
Donnelly is the deluded victim of his own arithmetic ; 
that the numerical arra}^ of cipher figures is really 



2S MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 

all mirage; and that as for the cipher itself, like the 
crater of Vesuvius, according to the hlase Sir 
Charles Coldstream, there is '^ nothing in it." Vol- 
taire says of Dante, that his obscurity causes him 
to be no longer understood, adding that he has had 
commentators, which is perhaps another reason. I 
will not insist upon anj^ parallel between Mr. Jen- 
nings and Dante (the action of the imagination of 
these two poets being widely different), further than 
to remark that the mathematical exhibit in Mr. 
Jennings' article is a decided case of woven darkness; 
and, as he has been favorably accepted and com- 
mented on by several of the intellectual reviewers 
under notice, it may be that their exegesis has 
greatly obscured, in my apprehension, the mochis ojyer- 
andi of his ingenious rebus. Certainl}^ it would 
seem, by the terms in which his scholiasts interpret 
and approve liis demonstrations, that each of their 
brains had turned into a pint of small white beans, 
a condition to which his composition assuredly tends 
to reduce the minds of all his readers. His general 
object is to show the utter shallowness and absurd- 
ity of Mr. Donnelly in attempting to withhold and 
conceal his primary or root number, which he 
declares is perfectly patent, and then, by a series of 
bewildering little computations, proceeds to expose. 
The number, he says, is always and everj^where, by 
all permutations and in all sorts of ways, simply 
222, and to this he conjoins in some mysterious 
fashion, perfectly dumbfoundering to me, what he 
calls '' a beautiful and buoyant little modifier — the 
' figure one.'^'^ When I read all this, it made me think 
of the equally luminous method by which certain 



1 



MR. D ONNELL T'S RE VIE WERS. • 19 

persons, according to good old Father Eabelais, get 
at the ages of the heroic and daemonic cycle. The 
cure of Meudon says in his profuse and jolly manner : 
"As for the demigods, fauns, satyrs, s^dvans, hob- 
goblins, aegipanes, nymphs, heroes and demons, 
several men have, from the total sum which is the 
result of the divers ages calculated by Hesiod, 
reckoned their life to be nine thousand seven hun- 
dred and twenty years; this sum consisting of four 
special numbers, orderly arising from one*^ the same 
added together and multiplied by four every way, 
amounts to forty ; these forties being reduced into 
triangles by five times, make up the total of the 
aforesaid number." Mr. Jennings' explication of 
the Donnelly cipher, conceived in all seriousness, 
though tossed with nonchalant and gay assurance 
to the public, and culminating in his ubiquitous 222, 
''orderly arising from one," would perfectly match 
the dumfoozler of Rabelais if it only had some- 
thing of its sane mockery. When it first appeared, 
there were three or four persons in the country, who, 
knowing Mr. Donnelly's real basic number, must 
have smiled to the depths of their midriffs at the 
spectral unreality of the substitute. Weeks later, 
when Mr. Donnelly, yielding to a general desire, 
published the root number in question, which was 
836, it must have been interesting to see Mr. Jen- 
nings' face lengthen at the suddenly disclosed dis- 
crepancy between the true figure, and the one he 
had revealed with such dogmatic confidence, together 
with its ''buoyant and beautiful little modifier — 
the figure 07ie.^^ Perhaps, however, the conscious- 
ness that his figment had, in the interim, wrought 



m 31 R. D OXXELL Y 'S BE VIE WEES, 

some injury to the circulation of the Donnelly 
volume^ ma}^ have consoled him for the disaster that 
had befallen his sapient revelation. That before its 
refutation or exposure, an}" part of the population 
could have been deterred by such a baseless fabric 
of a vision from reading the book before rejecting 
it, would seem to show that we have among us 
Captain Cook's Pelew Islanders in all their guileless 
innocence. 

Still another proof of the Arcadian simplicity of 
some readers is afforded by the credit which appears 
to have been given to an article in the St. Paul 
Pioiieer-Press of May 6th, afterward promoted to 
the dignity of a pamphlet, and widely circulated, 
especially at the West. It is entitled The Little 
Cryptogram, and is the work of Mr. J. Gilpin Pyle. 
Its strain is that of a rather venomous badinage, 
and its serious object to destroy the credibility of 
the cipher, b;v showing that under its rules j^ou can 
get any narrative you choose. The way the author 
illustrates this is to compose an insulting sentence 
made up from the text of Hamlet^ and lay alongside 
its several words the figures of a mock-cipher. Of 
course the process differs from Mr. Donnelly's in 
being perfecth^ arbitrary, and equally of course the 
performance is sheer travesty. Yet I was credibly 
informed, by a gentleman who had traveled at the 
time through the Xorthwest that numbers of people 
considered this rank and shallow burlesque irresisti- 
ble in point of humor, and an utter refutation of 
the methods of the cr3q3togram. Messrs. Colbert 
and Bidder, witnesses to the science of Mr. Donnelly's 
solutions, would hardly think Mr. Pyle's transparent 






MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. SI 

buffoonery worth a smile, but thej^ might easily be 
led to stare at the spectacle of sensible people giving 
it the slightest credence. A similar excursion was 
made in the New York Sun of May 6th. The author 
of the Cryptogram had deciphered of Ann Hatha- 
way, '' She hath a fine complexion, with a high 
color and long red hair," and the witty editor, paro- 
dying the cipher method, continued with, '' She 
sometimes rode, perforce, a costermonger's white 
horse." But as this chimed in with the current fad 
that a white horse is always seen in the neighbor- 
liood of a red-headed girl, one could be merely 
amused, and say lightly, '' The 8un is a jolly joker; 
it smiles for all." Whoever felt in the witticism an 
unfair mockery felt also that the injurious intention 
was quenched in the fun, and could declare like 
Jupiter in Hugo's poem, " I have laughed, therefore 
I pardon." The effect in Mr. Pyle's squib is differ- 
ent. He is not witty, and only produces a piece of 
sardonic slang, w^hich aims to do harm, and rests 
upon naked misrepresentation. The sentence he pre- 
tends to extract from Hamlet by the cipher method 
is this : *' Dou-nill-he, the author, politician and 
mountebanke, will work out the secret of this play. 
The sage is a daysie." One might as easily find in 
\\\Q Midsummer'^ s Night Dream b}^ such a cipher- 
method : '' If Jay-Gil-Pin-Pyle will onlie tie his ears 
over his heade in a neat bow-knot, and put on his 
liatte and keepe it on, no one will readily find out 
his resemblance to Nick Bottom. The hoodlum is a 
])each-blossom." But Mr. Pyle might think this 
style of cipher rather personal. It certainly is entirely 
apocryphal, which is another resemblance. Such 



fS MR. DOXXELL J 'S RE VIE WERS. 

an attempt at invalidation is really beneath even 
contempt, but one can hai'dly help feeling something 
like indignation to think that means like these 
should be employed to break down an honest author. 



IT. 



The foregoing are samples of some outlying varie- 
ties of ill treatment to which The Great Cryptogram^ 
has been subjected. But the full force of hostile 
criticism is not seen until we come to the pure 
hteraiy censure, where the small deceit and sinful 
games of the professional reviewer have full play. 
A writer in the Boston Daily Advertiser having 
announced that Mi\ Donnelly's book is dead, adds 
that it is because "'the best judges'* have condemued 
it. Let us see, therefore, by their judgments, what 
manner of men are '* the best judges/* 

First in order of dignity is Mr. Appleton Morgan, 
the president of the New York Shakespeare Society. 
As Mr. Morgan for some time, long before he could 
really know anything about the cipher, for the book 
was not then published, had done his best in various 
ways to sap and break it down in advance, his public 
api>eamnce against it in an elaborate article, nearly 
three columns long, close type, in the Xew York 
World of May 6th, was simply logical, though per- 
haps unexpected. He had been an avowed Baconian. 
a still more avowed anti-Shakespearean ; and what 
had actuated his private enmit}^ to the Donnelly 
book before he had read it, and his subsequent o\^e\^ 
attempt to set the myriad readers of The World 
against it, is best known to himself. 



MR DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 23 

It is curious to follow his points. He begins 
with the dogmatic assertion, shotted to the muzzle 
with insult and dishonor, that Mr. Donnelly has 
fabricated a story which is merely a cento — a novel- 
lette compacted of Shakespeare words; and has 
foisted it off by a trick of figures as a cipher nar- 
rative of Lord Bacon's. 

To show that no real cipher exists in the text, he 
asserts, with the air of one who was present when 
the first folio was printed, and knows all about it, 
that four printing houses in London were concerned 
in its manufacture, viz. : the establishments of W. 
Jaggard, Ed. Blount, I. Southweeke and W. Aspley, 
whose names were printed in the colophon as respon- 
sible for the press- work; and that consequently no 
four printing liouses, nor one printing house, could 
have preserved the particular arrangement of the 
words on the page on which, as Mr. Donnelly has 
found, the order of the cipher depends. Does not 
Mr. Donnelly see this? he asks, tauntingly. If Mr. 
Donnelly sees what I see, he sees that the mflexible 
rule of the old printing offices was, '' Follow copy, if 
you have to follow it out of the window ! " and this 
disposes at once of Mr. Morgan's idle objection. 
Under the orders of the hired proof-reader, or the 
master of the establishment, paid to secure compli- 
ance, the printers would set up with Chinese fidelity 
exactly what was put before them, and preserve 
intact the arrangement of the words upon the page, 
whether they were in four printing houses or forty. 
That exactly tliis was done in the case of the great 
folio, we have positive evidence. The folio is gen- 
erally well, and even carefully gotten up, but there 



JD2L DOySELLY 



:: — --^ - - oTial 



pages, whole 

n of the book 

deccentiica- 

-"er coaM 

-_ mechat- 

- z^d false 

^ impn^ 

:' ^ords 



aie ootaiii ^buses in 
^jS; and notably :: 
caBed SiMories — ^_t 
ties and Yii^tk»5 
have been made ez 
katlj in blind ck-^ 
paging woidsnnpr 
erir brai^eted^ a 
f<xced and sixaine xtge 

GT cciomn, with it mg just 

^> many there, nei — . — hich 

no ma^^'-printa _ t k or 

tolerate in a book unless by design, and which Mn 
DcMmellj has fonz e conditions of the cipher. 

That these pecoL ~^^ intentional k proTed 

by the following f I 32, nine years after the 

pablicaticm of the first folio^ Baocm and Shake^eare 
being both dead« anodier editicm of the fcdio was 
^4 ii^< ^'': e'^ exist, and the book 
Zt t was an opportonity 

:!al errcHS. ostensibly mon- 
iy directing printer, which 
What do we find I A few 
petty erriKS^ mostly typogia^icad, are corrected, 
showing that the book was reset nnder saperrisicHi. 
not medianically ; bnt the most notable are spared. 



Stcieo(^rpe 
was cexiainlr rese: 
to ccHTect the tyi^^ 
stioQS. and impose 
defonned the toL~. 



and the section of i 
the historical p. ~5 
peiT»sic»s n: 
oToitrandab- 
infez^^iceisine 



f-^' called Hisdiofrim — that is. 
e seeming mistakes and 
tJ jongle of incm- 
-plicated! The 
T -:inrired to com- 
pd the types to maintain the a^arratly false order 
:f :iizt :«fcMre^ and presrare intac: :ie ^ring 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 25 

pagination, the ridiculous hyphenation and bracket- 
ing, the grotesque word-crowding, and all the other 
eccentricities which mark the original folio. Mr. 
Morgan says that this typographical anarchy could 
not have been deliberately carried out in the first 
folio. That it was carried out in the first folio is 
decisively proved by the fact that it was carried out 
again, without the least variation (exceptions noted), 
in the second folio. It was done in bolli cases 
simply by the printers following cop\^, as they were 
bound to do, and as it was an iron rule to do. Mr. 
Morgan can never make any person of sense or fair- 
ness, who knows these facts, believe that it was done 
without design or by accident, and his attempt to 
show that Mr. Donnelly has thus no basis in reason 
for his cipher, is obviously a piece of pitiable weak- 
ness and futility. 

His remarks immediately following are not worth" 
comment. They seem singularly mud-witted and 
wandering, and are simply in continuation of his 
assertion, already disproved, that Mr. Donnelly has 
failed to see that the typographical eccentricities of 
the folio are due to mere '' shiftlessness'' on the 
part of the printers, and therefore afford no basis 
for cipher computations. To establish this, he 
descants with ludicrous incoherence on the odd fact 
that only one or two pages of the folio version of 
Troilus and Cressida are paged, while the rest are 
left unnumbered. This he explains on the theory 
that the printer did not know where to put the 
play. I do not see, nor can anybody see, wh}^ this 
should have made him fail to complete paging it, 
nor do I see liow the fact can in any wav affect 



S6 MR. DOXXELL T'S BEVIEWERS. 

injariously those conclusions of Mr. Donnelly to 
which great experts in crjptology have done rever- 
ence. 

Some floundering, however, may be expected 
from Mr. Moro^n on these unfamiliar orrounds. and 
his foot is only on his native heath when he comes 
upon philology, essaying to show that the cipher 
language is that of the mneteenth, and not of the 
seventeenth century : and hence that Mr. Donnelly 
is a clumsy forger. To expose the awkward villain 
by pure philological tests is now his purpose, and he 
begins by citing a sentence from the cipher narra- 
rative. The itahcs are mine : 

•^' He [Shakspere] is the son of a poor peasant, who 
yet follows the trade of glove-making in the hxtJe 
where he was bom and bred — one of the peasant 
towns of the West. And there are even rumors that 
Will and his brother did themselves follow the trade 
for some time before they came here.^' 

To this sentence Mr. Morgan at once apphes the 
fatal philological pick. '• Yet " in the sense of 
'' still.'- he says, is considerably later than Bacon's 
date. The assertion of so eminent an authority 
must have been very damaging to Mr. Donnelly in 
the mincLs of the multitudinous readers of TJie World. 
who doubtless at once thought the cipher fairly 
convicted and. exposed. As Mr. Morgan, however, 
unaccountably mentioned Dr. Abbott's Shakespearean 
Grammar in this connection. I at once tumeil to the 
lx»ok, and found in the ver\' first instance of the 
Elizabethan use of the word, his assertion flatly 
contradicted. " Yet in the sense of stUl^ explains 
Dr Abbott : and showing that it is not. as Mr. 



MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 27 

Morgan says, '^ considerably later than Bacon's 
date," he quotes : 

"You, Diana, 
Under ray poor instructions yet must suffer, 
Something in my behalf.'" 

Alls Well That Ends Well, Act IV, Sc, 4, 

One might expect a better knowledge of the text 
of Shakespeare in the president of the New York 
Shakespeare Society. But Mr. Morgan has been a 
Baconian, as he avows, and we poor Baconians are 
so ignorant ! 

Here is another instance, not in Dr. Abbott (but 
the instances are plentiful), of "yet" being used in 
the sense of " still." It is Portia chiding Brutus : 

**I urged you further; then you scratched your head 
And too impatiently stamped with your foot: 
Yet I insisted, yet you answered not." 

Julius Ccesar, Act II, Sc. 1. 
And here, again, is Brutus in the battle: 
'^Yet, countrymen, O yet hold up your heads!" 

Julius Civsar, Act F, Sc. 4. 

It is noticeable that Mr. Morgan gets away, 
Avith perhaps instinctive brevity, from this j)eril()us 
point of cavil, and comes swiftly to his second 
instance — " hole." '' The allusion to a country town 
as a hole is," he says, ^' a very modern usage." I am 
not at all sure that the word '^hole" in the cipher 
does not refer to the river valley of Stafford on-iVvon, 
the term then being archaic Saxon or Anglo-Saxon 
for dale or valley. I do not assert this, however, 
but assume that a town is meant in the cipher. In 
this sense it is commonly used contumeliously, in the 
vernacular of this country and also of Great Britain, 
though probably rarely in literature. I heard of a 



28 MR. D ONNELL 7'S RE VIE WERS. 

lively lady saying with much bounce, j^ears ago, 
•'Before I'd live in such a miserable hole as Chelsea, 
I'd die I " Lately a letter came to me from England 
which mentions a village as '' a pretty place enough, 
but a wretched hole." So in Robert Elsmere (Cliap. 
XY), where a dilapidated hamlet is described as ''a 
God-forsaken hole." The truth is that this common 
unliterary idiom is traditional, dating from time 
immemorial, and so prevalent was the term once that 
it w^as even frequentl}^ added to the proper names 
of towns in their derogation, as in the case of Stan- 
gate Hole, the village in tlie inland county of Hunt- 
ingdonshire, where the frightful murderer Masham 
w^as liano;ed in the old time: or Limehouse Hole, 
somewhere not far from London ; and in a quantity 
of such instances. The use of tlie word as in Holmes' 
Hole, Wood's Hole, (now altered to Holl, quite 
needlessh^,) or the Hole-in-the-Wall, is different, indi- 
cating here a sort of running-in place for vessels, a 
definition which the lexicographers are much at fault 
to make no note of. But apart from these designa- 
tions are those thrown more formerly than at pres- 
ent on mean or disliked places ; and Mr. Appleton 
Morgan knows ver}^ little of ''English as she is 
spoke" in England, when he ventures to consider 
'4iole" in this sense merely modern. Koget in his 
profoundly learned Thesaurus^ gives it repeatedly as 
indicative of a place, a precinct, an abode, an address, 
a seat, a habitation, as it always has been. Of 
course, everyone knows its antiquity as referring to 
a single dwelling. ''This worm-eaten hole," says 
Shakespeare, fleering at Warkworth castle. Here 
we have it as denoting in the words of Dryden, "a 



MR, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 29 

mean habitation." ISTovv, if a whole town or city 
was called in the sixteenth century ''a mean habita- 
tion," as when King James' Bible terms Babylon "a 
habitation of dragons," I do not see why Mr. Mor- 
gan should bring into question the antiquity of the 
cipher-English which calls such a habitation a hole. 
He continues his proof that Mr. Donnelly is a 
fraudulent manufacturer of words in their modern 
sense for his cipher, by averring that ^^even," as the 
above cited paragraph gives it, would not be used in 
Bacon's day. Still further, that it is doubtful 
whether it can be found much earlier than Pope, 
who says, '' Here all their rage and even their mur- 
murs cease ", this being exactly the sense in which 
the cipher employs it. He says that Mr. Donnelly 
uses it to mean '' likewise," etc., which is obviously 
untrue. It is used to carry the meaning of ^^as you 
would not have thought," or ''as you might not 
expect," the same as it does now. 

Let us see how ''even" was used in Bacon's day. 
'' Even that your pity is enough to cure me." 

Shakespeare Sonnets^ CXL. 
Meaning " even your pity," says Dr. Abbott. Will 
anyone deny that this is the grammatical equivalent 
of "even their murmurs?" Then the word does 
occur earlier than Pope, does it not, Mr. Morgan ? 
Here are other instances : 

''O^ use all arts, or haunt all companies, 
That may corrupt her, even in his eyes." 

Ben Jonson : Underwoods, 
**Mine eyes even seeing it.'' 

/ Iiiings, L: j^S^ 
"That thy trust may be in the Lord, I have made known 

to thee this day, even to thee. ^ , ^^tt 

*^' Proverbs, XXIL: 19, 



so MR. DONWELL T\S REYIE WERS. 

Be it remembered that the translation in which 
these texts occur is contemporary with Lord Bacon. 
Here are some sentences from Sir Thomas Browne, 
a writer, whose youth is contemporary with Bacon's 
age, and whose diction is so much hke one of the 
Yerulamian styles that S[>edding rejects on internal 
evidence, after due cogitation, some of Bacon's 
posthumous essays, conjecturally ascribing them to 
the author of the Rdigio Medicu rashly, I think, 
for how should any of Sir Thomas Browne's manu- 
scripts have gotten among Lord Bacon's private 
papers ? He says : 

^^or when eten cn>ws were funerally bunit.'* 

Urn, Burial^ CJu^pter I. 
"Z i 5 hope to rise again would not be content, '' etc 

Urn Burial^ Chapier L 
**E^: .. -_ -izaes of subiectioD.^ etc. 

Urn Burial^ Chapter I. 
An 5 ■:--: :n Jm: r 1 ::ini Cymbiica, in Anglia Sleswick, 
urns with : I'^rS vrere ::und.** etc. 

Urn Burial, Chapter II. 

Sir Thr: 3^ Ei rune's writings are fuU of this 
idiom. 

To multiply these instances would be easy, but 
those given show plainly that the sense in which 
'• even" is used in the cipher narrative, is no more 
modem than the times of Elizabeth and James. 

It is the same with the word "rumois." Mr. 
Morgan says that the word in the sense given in the 
cited paragraph, would not be used in Bacon's day, 
when it was always in the possessive, always per- 
sonified, and never pluralized. Let us see if this 
accomplished philologist speaks truly : 

'* But I can tell yon one thiDg, my lord, which I hear from 
eoBUgumrumortL^^ Timon^ Act Z27, 6c. 2. 



MR. DONNELLY'S BEVIEWERS. SI 

Here is a clear case, found in Shakespeare, though 
not known to the president of the Is'ew York 
Shakespeare Society, wiiere the word is not in the 
possessive, not personified, and is distinctly plural- 
ized ! And here are other samples, still from Shakes- 
peare : 

'' When I came hither to transport the tidings 
Which I have heavily borne, there ran a rumo7% 
Of many worthy fellows that were out." 

Macbeth, Act IV., Sc, 3, 
'* I find the people strangely fantasied, 
Possessed with rumors,'''' 

King John, Act IV, Sc. 2, 

For a test to prove the language of the cipher 
bogus, great is Mr. Appleton Morgan's philology ! 

He proceeds to fresh triumphs in this direction by 
citing the following sentence, given, he says, '' by 
Mr. Donnelly as written by Francis Lord Bacon.'' 

'^ I was in the greatest fear that they would say 
that the image shown upon the title-leaf of his 
volume was but a mask to hide my own face." 

Comment upon his perfectly ridiculous and 
utterly groundless philological objection to these 
words is rendered unnecessary by tlie fact that no 
such sentence is in the cipher, nor attributed to Lord 
Bacon anywhere in the book. False citations like 
this are what Montaigne calls '^ pinching the pig to 
make him speak." However, '' anything to beat 
Grant," is an axiom still in order. Mr. Donnelly 
must be vanquished, and when facts are wanting, 
let us have inventions. The sentence, it is true, 
occurs in the book, though not in the cipher, but it 
is purely suppositive on the part of Mr. Doiinell}^ and 
not ascribed to Lord Bacon at all — an illustration 



82 MB. DONNELLY'S REVLEWERS. 

of the sentence a reader might form, suspecting 
a cipher, when he saw a number of significant 
words near each other on a printed page ; and ^as 
Mr. Morgan, no matter what may be his defects m 
philological knowledge, knows how to read, no one 
was better aware of the fact than he. 

He continues the effort to convict Mr. Donnelly 
of forgeries by ferreting out a string of alleged 
anachronisms, at the character of which the reader 
cannot but marvel. They are the merest common- 
places, such as might have been uttered equally in 
the seventeenth or nineteenth century, having no 
ear-mark of style or manner to denote the date of 
their origin. '' The plays are much admired and draw 
great numbers.'' " The subjects are far beyond his 
ability." "Although I am acquainted with him, I 
would not have known him, the transformation was 
so great." " His looks prove it." Well I As Dr. 
McGlynn said of the doctrine of papal infallibility, 
"Good Lord ! " Does Mr. Morgan really expect any 
one to identify phrases as ordinary as these ? I could 
bring him fifty such, culled from the greatest Eliza- 
bethan writers, and defy him to name their century. 
The fact is that these citations look very like a 
trick on the part of Mr. Morgan, the suggestion as 
anachronisms of phrases so featureless that no one 
can give them the phj^siognom}^ of one time or 
another, at the same time leaving his own defama- 
tory intimation as a quasi-proof of the literarv 
villany of Mr. Donnelly. 

He goes on in this direction by affecting to quote 
from the cipher more phrases, whicli he avers 
belong to the language of another age. One of 



^ 



MR. DONNELLY'S BEVLEWERS. 33 

these is ^' appearance of danger/' and comes from a 
passage in the book, decidedly off-cipher, given to 
show, roughly, how under the control of different 
root-numbers, the same words contribute to three 
different narratives. As Mr. Donnelly makes no 
pretense to verbal accuracy in this passage, but ex- 
pressly the contrary, it would seem somewhat high- 
handed to select a phrase from it as proof of philologi- 
cal anachronism. But this Mr. Moro;an does, citino^ 
''appearance of danger" as unknown to Bacon's 
time, and therefore a forgery by Mr. Donnelly. 
Yet here is the same idiom in Shakespeare : 

^ ^Appearance of fanc}'." 

Much Ado, Act ILL, Sc, ^. 

And here it is in King James' Bible: 

^'Appearance of fire." 

Numlers: IX, L5, 

Besides, if the word '' appearance " in the cipher 
"phrase is to be understood, which is very possible, in 
the sense of '' probabihty " or ''likelihood," it is 
still a well-known idiom of Shakespeare's time, for 
in that sense Bacon uses it when he says, " There is 
that which hath no appearance.'^' Either way, Mr. 
Morgan's assertion has no validity. 

''Had fled" is another phrase he brings u]) for 
the conviction of Mr. Donnelly. Here we ai^e 
reminded ao^ain of Montaigne's saying, for the 
words are not in the ciplier, and once more the ])ig 
has been pinclied to make him speak. Anothei* 
pinch, and we have "a body of twenty", whicli is 
also not in the ciplier. Pinch the pig again, and 



S4 J^- DOXXELL F >" REVIEWERS. 

for, another quotation from an imaginary cipher 
text, Mr. Moi^n thinks it fair to present these 
fictitious phrases as proofs of the ignorance and 
wickedness of the man whose work he is pretending 
to estimate! I offer the spectacle as a picture of 
the ideal reviewer. 

He proceeds with the declaration that the phrase 
in which the cipher mentions the faihng Shakes- 
peare^ ^ He can not last long/' is in '-an idiom which 
certainly can not be fifty years old in the English 
lansroa^.'' On the contrary, the verv idiom occurs 
repeatetlly in the plays and in the other literature of 
the time: 

"The wonder is Lf ':: v:'_ ^ - ' ^ 

^ r, AH V. St. S. 
" A [dead] in ^e eight year.'' 



*' And /rtjf 9o„ lamg enc : _ ^ 
*' WelK T CM not losf €T^r 



:U Act r Se. 1. 
-If r Se.t. 



e. 



"To be free minded and 
meat, and of sleep, and of exer 
of 20119 loMtrng,^ — Beam's E^mmk 

Next we are instructed thai liie pmase * t : 
himself '^ was certainly not to be found in thai ag 
the allusion being to the cipher sentence "He is 
flattering himself with the hope and expectation that 
he will get well.'' But in Shakespeare we have : 
•• Flitf'^T'hirf Ik n.^J.f \^^ project of a power. ^ 

nmnty /r. Act L Se. 3. 

And m King James' Bible we have: 
'• He f..tLtd"df\ 'r iiffV'iii his own eyes.'* 

Bialmf XXXVT: 5. 

The idiom m ti-e lJ:u^?e cases is precisely the same. 



MB. DONNELLY' F; UEYTEWEUS. So 

Mr. Morgan's finest feat in the philological line 
is perhaps his attempt to trip Mr. Donnelly on the 
phrase of the Bishop of Worcester in the cipher con- 
cerning Shakspere's age — '^ Mthough he is not yet 
thirty-three." Here he lets one see he has him foul ! 
Nobody in that age, he declares, would say 'Hhirty- 
three," and the sentence is a manifest forger3\ ''Ask 
an Englishman to-day," says this unerring detective, 
'' how old a man is of the age indicated in the last 
sentence, and he will tell j^ou — not thirty-three, but 
three and thirty ; and I can not trace a time in the 
history of English when a contrary rule oldained!'^ 
Can not, indeed ! What does Mr. Morgan say to 
this: 

^^Ilast thou any grene cloth, said our kyngc, 
That thou wilt sell nowe to me? 
Ye, for God, sayd Eobyn, 

Thirty yerdes and tltree.'^ 

A Ljytell Geste of llohjn ILode: Ritson. 

It appears that Englishmen did not always say 
''three and thirty," but quite as often " thirty and 
three." Here is more evidence of similar liberty, 
dating from the fourteenth centur3\ 

^'In Jerusalem he reigned tldrty-three years and a luilf." 

Sir John 3fandeviUe, Cha]). VL 
"He was thirty -three years and three months old/' 

Hir Joint M(fndeviJIe^ Chap. VLL 

** Our Lady was conversant with her son thirty-three 

years and tliree months." 

Sir John Manderille, Cluip. X. 

Yet Mr. Morgan '' can not trace a time in the 
history of English " when people did not say " three 
and thirtv " instead of '' thirtv-three ! " 



3G MR. DOXyELLY'S nETIEWERS, 

If he were as conversant witli the plays as one 
Tvouid naturally expect the Grand Co]3ht of a Shakes- 
peare society to be, he would know that the great 
dramatist himself did not always, or even usually, 
put the cart before the horse in these constructions. 

For example : 

^' Whom thou obeyedst thirty and six years " 

3 Henry TT., Act III, Sc. 3. 
^' Toad that under the cold stone 
Days and night hast tltirfy-one." 

Macl)€th, Act IV Sc. 1. 
*'I have years on my \y.\Q\ forty -eight.'' 

Lear, Act I Sc. 4. 
'• He had before this hast expedition, tcenty-Jivev^oxnid^ui^oii 
him - — — Xow it'' ticerity-seven.'^ 

Coriolanus, Act II, Sc. 1. 
'• I have known thee these twenty-nine years.'''' 

2 Henry IV. Act II, Sc. 4. 
^' Ticenty-flve years have I but gone in travail." 

Comedy of Errors, Act F, Sc. 3. 
" TTere I but twenty-one, 
Your father's image is so hit in you — 
His very air — that I should call you brother.'' 

Winters Tale. Act V, Sc. 2. 
^'Methought I did recoil 
Twenty-three years.'' 

Wlntefs Tale, JLct I, Sc. 2. 

Of course. Shakespeare, whoever he was. might 
have said, and would have properly said, if he had 
chosen, six and thirty, one and thirty, eight and 
forty, five and twenty, etc.. instead of the locutions 
cited, but it was optional with him, as it Avas with 
Englishmen before and after him. and the way be 
used his option forms a fatal bar of precedent to the 
accusation Mr. Morgan brings against the Donnelly 
cipher in this particular. 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVLEWER8. 



37 



His final effort to invalidate the cipher text, and 
fix a mean crime on Mr. Donnelly, is probably the 
smallest thing he has done in the philological line, 
and certainly not the least disastrous to himself as a 
critic. Professing to quote from the cipher, he finds' 
" bitter beer" as one item of the supper at Stratford, 
and asks skeptically, " was there such a thing as 
' bitter beer ' ? " As there was beer called " sweet," 
of course, the other beer was discriminated as ''bit- 
ter." The discrimination continues to this day, and in 
England, I am told, you constantly hear of '' bitter 
beer." In one of our popular song-books, years ago, 
there was a catch with the doggerel lines : 

^' We'll drink Bass and Allsop's 
Glorious bitter beer." 

All this, however, is of no consequence bej^ond 
showing how little equipment Mr. Morgan has for 
his self -chosen task of defamatory criticism, the true 
point being that this is the closing instance of pinch- 
ing the pig to make him speak, and arousing squawk 
we get from him. The quotation is a sheer manu- 
facture. There is nothing about bitter beer in the 
cipher. The phrase used is ''bottle-ale." 

Later it came out that while Mr. Morgan pro- 
fessed in his World article to cite from the cipher, 
he was really citing from a letter Mr. Donnelly had 
written him long before, in which, I presume, no 
effort had been made to give the exact cryptic 
language. The reader will admire the ingenuous- 
ness of this proceeding, especially when nice points 
of philology were involved, depending u])on precise 
terms. A month after the book was published, he 
appeared in the June Shakef^j)ereana, correcting his 



38 ME, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 

false citation to read '• bottle-ale," and carelessly ob- 
serving, as though it were of no consequence, that 
he had not obtained it from the book he had been 
reviewing. He then charged that Mr. Donnelly had 
made an alteration in the cipher since he wrote the 
letter, offering not the slightest evidence in support 
of this assertion; and further that he had '' laid 
one question but opened up another, naftiely: Was 
there any ale in bottles in those days ? " Ale was 
home-brewed everywhere, he saj^s, not stowed away, 
nor exported. " Wh v should it have been brought 
upon Shakespeare's table in bottles? " Still harping 
on the cipher, you see ! He will not allow the pub- 
lic to believe that Mr. Donnelly, is, even on one 
point, anything but a forger of documents. 

Nevertheless, there was ^^ bottle-ale " in those 
days, as people know who are not so silly and ill- 
read as to raise a question about it. Here is one 
reference to it among many : 

* 'Everyone that can frame a booke in rime, though it be 
but in commendation of copper noses or hottle ale, wiU catch 
at the garlande due to poets."" 

Webl)es Discourse of English Foetrie, 1586. 

Here again the President of the New York Shakes- 
peare society's lack of familiarity with the pages of 
the Shakespeare drama, kept from his knowledge , 
further instances, which would have prevented him 
from publicly doubting the existence of Elizabethan 
ale in bottles. As thus: 

"The Myrmidons are no ho ttle-ale houses,^'' 

Tioelfth Night, Act II, Sc. 3. . 

And again : 
**Whata beard of the general's cut, and a horrid suit of the 
camp, wiW do among foaming lottles and ale-'iDashed wits is 
wonderful to be thought of." 

Henri/ V, Act III, Sc. 3, 



MB. D ONNELL Y 'S BE VIE WEBS. 39 

And jfinally, (it is hoped that no indignant Bacon- 
ian will utter the line with significance,) 

**Away you lottle-ale rascal !" 

2 Henry IV, Act II, Sc. 4. 

The rain of philological learning with which Mr. 
Morgan has been fertilizing the public mind, drib- 
bles away here into a few scattering drops. One 
is that the cipher sentence, "His purse is well 
lined with the gold he receives from the plays," 
'^does not sound like Baconian or Jacobean English." 
" Does not sound^^^ indeed. A rare touchstone for 
a student of language. To Ime a coffer, a pocket, a 
purse with gold, occurs constantly in seventeenth- 
century English. "What if I do line one of their 
hands ? " says Shakespeare. "I to line my Christmas 
coffers," says Massinger. " When thou feelest thy 
purse well lined," says Eatsei. But one need not 
linger on such trivia, which simply show Mr. Mor- 
gan's remarkable ignorance of his subject. The only 
point worth notice in this part of his article is his 
muddy-headed effort to catch Mr. Donnelly in an 
anachronism showing fraud. It appears by the 
cipher that the Bishop of Worcester wrote a letter 
to Cecil, about Shakespeare, in which he reports, "It 
is thought he will buy all the land appurtenant to 
jN'ew Place." Now this, says Mr. Morgan, could not 
possibly have been inserted in cipher in the Henry IV 
quartos of 1598-1600, nor in the folio of 1623, because 
Shakespeare had already bought the land at New 
Place a year or two prior to the date of the first 
quarto. Hence, Mr. Donnelly has forged the sentence 
and is to be held up to public derision. But what was 
the date of the Bisho2)^s letter to Cecil ? Oh, no matter I 



J^O MR. DONNELLY'S REYLEWERS. 

Admirable reasoner. Boiled down to a single 
allspice, Mr. Morgan's point is just this, Bacon could 
not have put the sentence into a cipher in the quartos 
of 1598-1600, or the folio of 1623, because the 
Bishop of Worcester wrote his letter to Cecil prior 
to Shakespeare's making the purchase in 1597. 
Peerless logician ! 

V. 

An additional proof that there is really no cipher 
in the text, and that the one presented is entirely 
spurious and made by Mr. Donnelly, is the fact, says 
Mr. Morgan, that it does not resemble any of Lord 
Bacon's acknowledged works; and he asks with 
crushing force, "Does the cipher narrative remind 
us of the Essays^ or of the Novum Orgcmxim^ or of 
the De Augmentis ? " Why let us see : 

"Atque quemadmoduin sectge conditores non sumus, ita 
nee operum particularium largitories aut promissores." 

— Novum Organum^ CXYII. 

Certainly the difference between the style of the 
cipher and the Novum Organitm is obvious, and the 
parallel is discouraging; but let us look further: 

*' Urbes munitge plena armamentaria equorum propagines 
generosge, currus armati, elephanti, machinse atque tormenta 
bellica omnigena, et similia, " etc. — De Augmentis. 

It appears we fare no better with the De Aug- 
mentis^ and must in all frankness admit that the sim- 
ple English of the cipher story does not ''remind us" 
of Bacon's rolling and resounding Latin. As for the 
Essays^ their matter is quite matched by their art ; 
they are studiously apothegmic, almost gnomic, in 
their construction ; and the reader must concede to 
Mr. Morgan that the cipher is not cast in their 



MR. DONNELLY'S REYIEWERH, 4I 

mold. But who but a genius like him would 
require that it should be, or demand that an English 
style should tally with a Latin ? Had he sought to 
bring into the comparison Lord Bacon's Apotliegms^ 
or some of his somewhat stiff and ineloquent private 
letters, or even certain paragraphs of his History of 
Henry VII, ^ there might be some sense in it, but he 
advances the plain tale of the cryptograph, sets it 
against the powerful rhetoric, cast for eternity, of 
three of Bacon's greatest works, and asks, with 
bland simplicity, whether the one '^reminds "us of 
the others. This is truly pastoral, and what Mr. 
Morgan wants is a broad hat of plaited straw, blue 
ribbons, a crook, and some sheep. One would think 
that the fact would have occurred to him that the 
cipher story must necessarily have been seriously 
cramped by having to move in the shackles of the 
outer text, and that this condition alone would have 
prevented any great effects of style, or resemblance 
to any rhetorical masterpiece. The greatest artist 
in language, set to move in the interior of a grand 
play with a cipher narrative, would find that he had 
to perform a fetter-dance of singular difficulty. But 
Mr. Morgan sees nothing of all this, and rolls off 
with complacency his shallow guff about the want 
of ''parallel" between a necessarily restricted and 
labored secret text, and the might\^, untrammeled 
diction of the Novum Organnm, 

Whether the manner of the cipher does not 
coincide with Lord Bacon's more than the critic 
imagines, is a question which need not be entered 
upon. The immediate concei*n is with Mr. Morgan's 
critical exploits, the next of vv^hich is quite worthy of 



MR. DOXXELLY'S REVIEWERS. 



all that precede it. Keeping in view tlie destruction 
of Mr. Donnelly's book, he o^oes on to declare that 
the great folio of 1623 is not authentic ! Here 
is a book put forward as a inagnuni ojjus — the first 
collected edition of plays then famous with the pub- 
lic: a book which at once mounted to supremacy, and 
so kept it that a perfect copy of it to-day is worth 
$5,000 : a book on which we reh" for our fullest 
knowledge of itsauthor*s works, containing, as Mr. 
Morgan himself says, several of the plays never 
heard of tmtil its publication ; and Mr. Morgan 
declares it is not authentic, and gives this as a reason 
why Lord Bacon would never have chosen it as a 
place of concealment for his cipher narrative ! What 
place should he have chosen ? The '* stolen and 
surreptitious copies '" The scattered quartos? The 
absurdity of this position has never been excelled. 
It is obvious that whether the first folio were 
*' authentic'' or not, it would have been a sufficient 
depository for Lord Bacon's secret history, if only 
because it was unique, famous, and assured of popu- 
lar permanence, as it has proved to be. Another 
palpable absurdity Mr. Morgan commits, in his zeal 
to impugn Mr. Donnelly's veracity, is to assert that, if 
Bacon chose the folio for his cover, he would have 
been careful to have the text exact — fi^ee from inter- 
polations, which, he says, it is not. What has the 
purity of the text to do with its capacity for enfold- 
ing a secret reading ? Manifestly nothing. In fact, 
it appears that in certain cases the corruption of the 
text is caused by the exigencies of the cipher. 
Moreover, it is clear enough that some of these 
impurities which Mr. Morgan considers *• actors' 



MR, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 43 

interpolations," are so only in his own fancy. For 
example, the folio gives in Lear.thQ following lines : 

" Pray do not mocke me, 

I am a very foolish, fond old man, 

Four score and upwards, 

Not an hour more or less; 

And to deal plainly, 

I fear I am not in my perfect mind. " 
The line in italics Mr. Morgan thinks an actor's 
interpolation, adding that the author would never have 
put it there, because it is incoherent and makes the 
other lines ridiculous by impairing their pathos. But 
it is at once a question, with the reader, whether this 
incoherence is not in perfect keeping with Lear's 
weak and wandering mental condition ; and this is 
comfirmed by his immediate misgiving in the next 
lines, where he seems to feel that w^hat he has just 
said is nonsense, and fears that he is not in his per- 
fect mind. A stroke of genius like this flickering 
lapse from noble pathos to pitiable incongruity, is 
not usually characteristic of actors' interpolations. 
ITor is it at all clear that the speech of Falstaff in 
the Merry Wives, where he prays '' God bless me 
from that Welsh fairy!" is a bit of actor's burlesque. 
Mr. Morgan's misreading here is really amazing. 
Falstaff, crouched in the fern around Heme's oak, 
sees the company enter, with their pretty twinkling 
tapers, disguised as fairies. Evans, the AVelshman? 
one of them, speaks his lines, and Falstaff, not recog- 
nizing him, but hearing his Welsh accent, naturally 
in his scared and bewildered condition, thinks him 
a Welsh fairy, and delivers himself accordingly. 
Could anything be plainer? Yet Mr. Morgan must 
find this, like the other, an instance of '' changes 



U Jffi. BOJS^ELLT S EEVIEWMB& 

made by players,'' spurred against reason, by his 
desire to make oat that Mr. Donnelly is a cheat 
and a liar! 

The same motive drives him into the attempt to 
estabUsh that the plays most have been written by 
an actor, (Shakespeare) ; and that therefore Mr. 
Donnelly is without his prime basis, because the 
histrionic profession arrays itself soUdly, by instinct^ 
against the Baconian theory. Actors themselves, 
he declares, are never Baconians. Mr. Morgan is 
mistaken. Charlotte Cushman was a Baconian ; and 
doubtless, if the matter were looked into, there 
would be found others. But Miss Cushman was not 
only a great actor — in certain roles of comedy, as 
in As You Uke 1% or the Jealous Wife^ never 
excelled by anyone — ^but she was also a woman of 
wide culture, and of a strong and scholarly intellect. 
This enabled her to study the plays by lights which 
the very profession of most actors excludes, and to 
which as a cla^ their whole training and experience 
are foreign. What is there in the discipline of 
actors, as suclu to make them critical umpire of a 
vast and difficult literary question, Uke that of the 
origin, purpose and relation of the Shakespeare 
plays ! Who made them judges? Their business is 
strictly and purely personation; to act^ and to study 
to act, by mastering the means which magnetic elo- 
cution, delivery and presence offer for the moving of 
the mind and souL It is a great function; how 
great they know best in our generation who have 
been transported by Henry Placideor William War- 
ren in comedy, or electrified by the elder Booth or 
Bachel in tragedy. But it is not allied to the 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 45 

function of criticism. When I think of some actors I 
have seen or known — sterling old John Gilbert, a 
great star who has never starred, sound as oak in 
sense and judgment; Forrest, matchless in his subtle 
comprehension of the meaning of his text; that 
majestic elder Booth, just named, whose intuitions 
were as broad and bright as tropic lightning ; that 
incomparable Rachel, also named, less a woman than 
a sibyl in her intelligence; Coquelin, whose Avriting 
alone, notably his recent fine appreciation of the 
lyric beauty and grandeur of Victor Hugo's genius, 
shows an intellect of no common scope and deli- 
cacy ; the incomparable William Warren, Hackett, 
the two Placides, Burton, Henry Irving — when I 
think of them, or their few equals, I could almost 
regard them competent to express as wise a judg- 
ment, by native insight, on the true authorship of the 
Shakespeare pla^^s as did their peer, Charlotte Cush- 
man. Still the trust Avould be hazardous, for they 
would be off their beat, and as actually as though 
the problem were one of astronomy. If one would 
be warned of what might be expected in such a field 
from the ordinary run of actors, let him consult the 
article by Lawrence Barrett, Concerning Shakespeare^ 
in the North American Review^ of last December. 
Mr. Barrett is an actor of talent, representing a high 
average of his profession, and stands eminent in 
popular esteem. But no one fairly conversant with 
the literature of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, 
or with literature at all, can read his contribution 
without amused disdain. To his a]^prehension, the 
whole enquiry is nothing but an emanation ol" the 
literary skepticism and ''blind irreverence'' of 



J^e MR. DOXXELLT\S REVIEWERS. 

which, he says, Huxley, Darwin and Tyndall have 
proved the forerunners! This stroke of judgment 
would make a cat laugh, since it is notoriously 
known that our fruitful modern criticism began, (at 
least since it ceased to be subterranean), with Vol- 
taire and the Encyclopedists ; and continued with the 
mio:htv breed of Germans, like ]S'iebuhr, who revised 
the old statements and made them conform to sense 
and fact, long before Huxley, Darwin and Tyndall 
were born. As for the startling anomaly, the down- 
right contradiction, between Shakespeare's personal 
record and his reputed works, which staggered Guizot, 
Hallam, Schlegel, Coleridge, Emerson and a host of 
perfectly orthodox scholars, he appears to be entirely 
oblivious of it ; a slight lack, one would think, to any 
proper consideration of the question. All through the 
article, even from the start. Bacon is for him the 
impossible monster Pope invented and the world 
never saw: — '*the wisest, brightest, meanest of man- 
kind ; '' — and to think of him as the author of the plays, 
is, to his mind, simply reason gone to seed in folly. 
A notable feature is the biographical sketch he 
gives of Shakespeare, bald as the head of Martin Van 
Buren, and leaving out all the incidents that would 
make it graphic, possibly because they would also 
make it discreditable. The story of the outrageous 
and wanton trespass, which no owner of a country 
estate would endure, any more than did Sir Thomas 
Lucy; the traditions and proofs of his coarse amours, 
his drunkenness, his greed, his usury ; his jparvemi 
ambitions ; his attempt to wring from the hard hands 
of peasants their poor landed rights : his impudent 
and dishonest efforts to obtain armorial bearings, 



MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 47 

are all omitted. The only salient point is that Mrs. 
Shakespeare, who survived her lord, put up the 
monument to his memory in Stratford church. (For 
a bold bouncer, this takes the cake and bears the 
bell.) To the present day, it is an utter mystery who 
erected the monument, with the bust on top, which 
the great sculptor, Chantrey, thought, by certain 
tokens, was carven from a death-mask ; with the two 
little cherubs, one blowing a trump of fame, or hold- 
ing an inverted torch (I forget which), the other 
pointing downward with a spade; and with the 
tributary inscriptions, one of them in Latin, in which 
the poet is compared to Nestor, Socrates and Yirgil. 
But this oracular actor states that it w^as Mrs. 
Shakespeare that did it — states it, too, with careless 
assurance as something always known. " The facts 
am false", averred the colored orator; and there are 
a great number of positions, assumptions and asser- 
tions in Mr. Barrett's article, to which the expression 
is applicable. He seems quite imbued, rightly 
enough, with the idea of Shakespeare's personal illit- 
eracy or scant education ; but, therefore, in defer- 
ence to his fetish, he thinks it necessar}^ to assume 
the most supercillious attitude toward learning as a 
correlative of genius. Scholarship, he thinks, has 
never been the concomitant of creative literature, 
though he could be safely defied to show a single 
poet or author, of the first magnitude, antique or 
modern, who was not a scholar also. It is in this 
connection that he actually has the fatuity to ad- 
vance the notion that the mighty Eschylus, and his 
almost compeers, Sophocles and Euripides, were less 
in attainment than Plato. lie tacitly, and even 



48 2tB, DO^rXZZ I 7 5. Z r WEBS. 

more than tacitly, assumes the unlettered condition 
of Shakespeare, seomfallT saying in this general 
relation, " Collies do not create poets ; ", and then 
glorifies MoUere, who, he seems to imply, was one of 
the same kind ; leaving his readers with the impres- 
sion that, like Shakespeare, he was all genius and no 
learning. He forgets that Moliere was thoroughly 
educated at Clermont, then one of the finest collies 
in Europe; was also the special pupil of the great 
philosopher Gassendi ; and was afterward for some 
years a student of law. He ought to know that 
there is no parallel in educational proficiency be- 
tween this actor and the one of the Globe Theatre, 
at whom ''Bye. Quyney/^ in his life-time, spat 
the Jeering epithets, ^^HiMrio! mima/'^ But 
the crowning enormity of this grotesque article, 
by a flower of the profession, is the unseemly 
manner in which its author permits himself to speak 
of Lord Bacon. He ignores, if he ever knew with 
what adoring ardor, what glowing veneration. Bacon 
was regarded by that very Gassendi, the illustrious 
master of his revered MoUere, whose old French 
eyes would have blazed with noble anger, could he 
have heard one he knew to be good and great so 
foully vilified. The histrionic reviewer needs to be 
told that his censure is as unfitting as unmannerly, 
for, even should the varied infamy charged on Bacon 
be proved, as it never has been, he would stiU remain 
a majestic man : still remain, even then, in the words 
of Browning, our "spirit's arbiter, magnificent in 
sin : '' and, whatever the disclosures, never would 
deserve, as Mr. Barrett says, ""immortal contempt as 
his portion." The tone adopted toward Bacon is as 



MR. DONNELLY'S UEVtBWEUS. Ifi 

sophomorical as it is ferocious and diracefsgul, and 
shows how ignorant the critic is of his subject, and 
of the results of recent investigation. When he 
mentions "that withering denunciation of Lord 
Macaulay, which will cling to Bacon w4ien the 
Shakespeare myth is forgotten," he makes it evident 
that he has not got far enough in his knowledge to 
know that the denunciations of the unscrupulous 
Scotch sophist are not much for clinging, especially 
among w^ell-read Americans. He has apparently 
never heard of Hepworth Dixon, who, on this sub- 
ject, laid out both Lord Campbell and Macaulay 
uncommonly cold. He seems to have never read 
the Evenings with a Reviewer^ that work in which 
the illustrious Spedding, a pedestrian mind, not 
talaria-ankled, not " clinquant, all in gold," like 
Macaulay, but slow, sure, terrible in the possession 
of his patient research, and in his unflawed veracity 
and perfect candor, plods on, like Zisca in the battle 
with his scythe, mowing down the host of verbal 
tricks and lies arrayed against Bacon, and destroy- 
ing forever the historic credit of the shameless 
defamer of William Penn, who also blackened the 
fame of the greatest of Englishmen. If Mr. Barrett 
had read these books he would then have been only 
in the beginning of knowledge, but he would have 
learned enough to know that Bacon was never false 
to Essex — that violent and turbulent young man, 
long estranged from his great guide, who sank from 
his noble early promise into the life of a dissolute 
libertine, broke out at last into a selllsh and bloody 
treason, and meanly sacrificed, when doonunl, the 
wretched comrades whom he had led into his bad 



50 ME, D ONNELL T'S EE VIE WEES. 

enterprise. He would have learii!:d further that 
Bacon never corrupted justice as Chancellor, every 
one of his decisions being unrevoked b}^ the very 
Parliament that ruined him, and standino; intact to 
this day; that he never, not in a single instance, 
took bribes, but only the fees and free gifts apper- 
taining to his office, vrhich he was expected to take ; 
which stood as make-weight to its petty salary ; and 
which Sir Thomas More and every Chancellor took, 
unimpeached, before him; that he never, as Mr. 
Barrett dechares, — parroting the brilliant knave, 
Macaulay, — " favored torture," but in the very case 
of Peacham referred to, opposed it, being simply 
present, under protest, as a subordinate member of 
the council that examined the poor miscreant ; and 
that he never, either b}^ character or action, merited 
the vile insolence thrown upon him by this theat- 
rical popinja}" when he calls him the '•meanest of 
mankind/' Mr. Barrett's essay, in fine, does not 
sustain Mr. Morgan's notion that actors, as such, are 
competent to ntter judgment on the authorship of 
the plays. Its miserable farrago of toadying plati- 
tudes, sophomoric invective, misstatement, suppres- 
sion in consequence and ignorance, and can never win 
a deeper tribute than a sardonic smile from the 
ordinary well-read reader; — a reader who will close 
his perusal with a curling lip, and perchance remem- 
ber the superb and savage gibe Junius flung at the 
actor Garrick, '' Keep to your pantomimes, you 
vagabond I " 

ri. 
Mr. Morgan labors to prove that the dramas 
could not have been written by Bacon, because of 
their manifest adaptability in action to the stage ; 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 51 

because, in his own words, '' they are too evidently 
the work of a practical inventor of plays." I remem- 
ber reading an article ten years ago by Julius Ben- 
edix, a distinguished German authority, the author 
of over thirty dramas, so successful that several of 
them have been translated into other languages, and 
himself the practical manager of several leading 
German theaters; and he demonstrated beyond 
cavil that from the point of view of the playwright, 
the dramas of Shakespeare violate the requirements 
of the stage in every particular. The proof of their 
relative unfitness for representation, and of their not, 
therefore, having originated in the brain of a dra- 
matic manager, is found in the fact that some of them 
are never acted, and all the others, without excep- 
tion, exist only for the theatre in a stage edition, 
abridged, altered and excised, often in the most 
radical manner. So much for Mr. Morgan's idea 
that their structure shows that they must have been 
written by an actor. Besides, the argument proves 
too much: — nothing less than that all successful 
dramas must have had actors for their authors, 
w^hich is notoriously untrue. Is there anything 
finer than the elder Dumas' Lady of Belle Isle'l 
Are not Victor Hugo's plays, Ilernani, Riiy Bias 
and the others, almost incomparable for stage effect, 
as for ideal picturesqueness and beauty ? What 
play better keeps the stage for its acting merits, 
than Bulwer's Richelieu^ So with a hundred in- 
stances. But the authors were not actors. The 
idea is simple folly. 

Such is the kind of article relied on to damage or 
destroy Mr. Donnelly's book, and srnt out to many 



5-2 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 

thousands of readers. Such is one of ^'the best 
judges/- Do ^>ye coraphiin without reason of such 
reviewing or reviewers' 

Mr. Morgan ends by asserting that Mr. Donnelly 
has killed the Baconian theoiy and buried it "- deeper 
than ever plummet sounded." Has he, indeed? 
That is just exactly what we are going to see ! 
Meanwhile Mr. Morgan personally abjures the 
Baconians, of whose Spartan band he was, he says, a 
member. Stand fast, brood of Leonidas! You can 
spare him I Ten j^ears ago he published a book, The 
SlKCkesjyeare 2fyth. I will not claim that it was 
faultless, but it was a strong, and in the main admir- 
able, brief in the case against Shakespeare ; and it 
stands to-day unanswered and unanswerable. Be- 
fore he takes his leave of the Baconians, I recom- 
mend him to confute his own volume. To do that 
would justif\^ his apostacy, but I tell him plainly 
that the task is bevond his powers! 

VII. 

The next one of '* the best judges " who deserves 
attention, is Mr. H. A. Clapp, who appeared by 
special editorial announcement, in the Boston Daily 
Ad'certiser of May 18, of which eminent paper he 
is understood to be the dramatic critic. He is also 
known as a fine lecturer on Shakespeare. 

It is simply sorrowful to find him on the wool- 
sack with Mr. Appleton Morgan, in such a trial. 
The Advertiser itself is a comfort among journals, 
and its dramatic notices especially have always 
seemed to me unexcelled for judiciousness and 
charm. Alas ! to find their graceful author alter- 
nately hooting among '• the best judges" and hopping 



MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 53 

along upon bladders, like a giddy Bassaride, in a 
vindictive chase after Mr. Donnelly ! 

He has over two columns of unqualified condem- 
nation, based upon the initial declaration that '' no 
competent critic will have the patience " to go 
through the Great Cryptogram ; so that the world, 
he avers, will never know whether the author's solu- 
tions are justified. Unless Mr. Clapp owns that he 
is not a " competent critic," in which case he is only 
an ordinary review^er, and no good except for defa- 
mation, this is tantamount to saying that he has 
never read the book he is going to criticise. His 
course is sensible. To read a book, before deciding 
on its value, interrupts the flowing freedom of one's 
periods in condemning it. Mr. Clapp's article, apart 
from its express avowal, shows that this has been 
his method. It is an interesting confession to start 
with. 

Honest perusal thus given the go-by, for lack of 
'' patience," his plan is to prance hoppety-skip over 
a small part of the volume, flippantly picking out 
here and there such phrases as may be used to show 
that Mr. Donnelly is a multitudinous ignoramus, 
knowing little or nothing of the rules of mathemat- 
ics or logic, or matters relating to the text of the 
plays, and generally incompetent. His aim is to 
invalidate the book by a series of minute cavils on 
side issues. Nothing like comprehensive or substan- 
tial treatment is even attempted. A few {|uibbles 
are all the base of objection. It is told of a gay 
French editor that, one terribly sultry day, he 
plumped down at his desk, seized liis editorial pen, 
and shouted, '^ I am o'oini>' to i»'ive it to the sun 



5J^ MR. DONI^ELLT'S LEYIEWERS, 

good ! " The Great Cryptogram^ too, has now to 
catch it, and it appears that this sun is to be judged 
by its spots. But, as tliese are mainly Mr. Clapp's 
ink-spots, and not an essential part of the luminar^^ 
I submit that they form no proper basis for its 
denunciation. 

Here are the assaults, seriatim : Mr. Donnelly 
says that authors have a parental love for their 
works, citing, as apropos, lines from the Shakespeare 
Sonnets, such as those which call a writer's thoughts 
''the children of his brain," or declare them to have 
a worth which will make them outlive the monu- 
ments of princes, etc. " Clear blunderheadedness," 
Mr. Clapp's retorts, '4ie mistakes the author's asser- 
tion of the enduring worth of his sonnets for an 
assertion of the worth of his plays." Not at all, 
and Mr. Clapp here combines essential misrepresen- 
tation with flippant insult. Mr. Donnelly, manifestly, 
cites the sonnet lines to illustrate the general truth 
that an authors thoughts are to him as precious 
offspring ; just as he might have cited lines from 
Spenser or Shelley, and with no less appositeness. 
But at any rate it is fine in Mr. Clapp to assume, for 
a basis, that an author does not necessarily love " the 
children of his brain." He ought to have knoAvn 
that 'Hhe contrary opinion of critics," and ''the 
almost universally accepted belief," which he as 
gratuitously as insolently reproaches Mr. Donnelly 
for " never having heard of," are mighty poor evi- 
dence that Shakespeare, whoever he was, did not 
cherish his plays ; and also mighty good evidence 
that the fool-killer is as sound asleep as Frederick 
Barbarossa in his cavern. Meanwhile, how does any 



ME. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 55 

awkwardness in illustration, even if it existed, or 
any possible ignorance of '' the opinion of critics," 
or of ^'universally accepted (and highly asinine) 
beliefs, affect the substantial value of the Great 
Cryptogram? Really the non-sequitur here is so 
gross as to suggest the no7i compos ! 

The reviewer's labors continue with the assertion 
that Mr. Donnelly beginning his toils on the cipher 
by '' picking out words without the help of a con- 
cordance," shows what sort of a mind he has. The 
information in regard to this piece of oafishness, or 
leaden stupidity, is derived from the book, and is 
flat misrepresentation. Mr. Donnelly simply says 
that when he began, fifteen 3^ears ago, to look over 
the plays for surface indications of a cipher, he had 
no concordance : — naturally enough, being then in a 
lonely mansion, in Minnesota, on tlie banks of the 
Mississippi. This petty perversion shows the spirit 
in which his critic assails him. 

Mr. Clapp next shows that Ford in the Merry Wives 
buffets himself on the forehead, crying '' peere-out," 
in allusion to the horns of hiscuckoldry, and derides 
Mr. Donnelly mercilessly for having failed to catch - 
the meaning of his exclamation, and also for consid- 
ering it a '^ forced" expedient to get a word for the 
second syllable of Shakespeare's name. Here is 
another mountain made out of a mole hill! At 
most the error pointed out is a mere misreading — a 
solitary mistake too small formorethan good-natured 
correction without comment. But in I'egard to the 
phrase, '^ peere-out," Mr. Donnelly is plainly right, 
for while it is well enough, it shows more ingenuity 
than felicity, and is certainly sufficiently " forced" 



56 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 

into the text to attract attention by its peculiarity. 
Horns do not naturally " peer," Mr. Clapp, though 
eyes do ! 

Mr. Donnelly is next accused of '* ignorance" or 
''foolishness" for noticing, as a similar pecuharity, 
the evident dragging in of a name in the Mei^ry 
Wives, The host bombastically bawls to Dr. Caius 
— '' Is he dead, my Ethiopian ? Is he dead, my Fran- 
cisco? Ha, bully! What says my Esculapius?" 
'' As there is no Francisco in the play," observes Mr. 
Donnelly, 'Hhis is all rambling nonsense, and the 
word seems dragged in for a purpose." '' And what 
pray," retorts Mr. Clapp, '4s the quality of the 
Host's rhodomontade ? Is not Ethiopian also dragged 
in ? " Softly, good critic ! As the jolly host is spout- 
ing buffoonery, he may, with artistic propriety, cail 
Dr. Caius, " my Ethiopian ;" he may also, with even 
better cause, call him '^ nw Esculapms ;" and he 
might further call him ^' my iguanodon," ot "my 
trilobite ; " or " my right-angled triangle," or " my 
cassowary," or " my jub-jub bird ; " but the odd rea- 
son there is in nonsense forbids him to call him '' my 
Francisco " since it is not in the cateo-orv of mere 
nonsense w^ords, as one Avould think Mr. Clapp 
might see. To a cipher hunter the introduction of 
a proper name here is certainly suspicious, being 
incongruous and peculiar, and forming, you might 
say, a protuberance on the level surface of the text. 

Mr. Donnelly, having had the temerity to think it 
singular that Falstaflf's theiving crew should be men- 
tioned as " St. Nicholas' clerks," unless the word 
*' Nicholas " was wanted for the cipher, (St. Anthony 
being the true scampsman's patron), is next 



MR. DONNELLY'S BEVIEWERS, 57 

contemptuously told that, " Reference to any well an- 
notated edition would have taught him that the 
phrases ' St. N'icholas' clerks ^ and ' St. Nicholas' 
knights' were common slang of the day for thieves 
and robbers." Reference to any well annotated 
edition would have taught him nothing of the kind; 
see, for example, Howard Staunton, a prince of 
Shakespeare editors, whose note on the subject is to 
tlie effect that makino^ St. Nicholas the tutelarv 
guardian of cut-purses, as two old authors he cites 
have improperly done, has never been satisfactorily 
explained. 

The next charge made against the book is too 
trivial and merely nagging to deserve notice. Mr. 
Donnelly's point is to show the forced use of lan- 
guage by which the name of ^^ Bacon" or ^'Bacon's 
son" is got into the text. The sentence is Falstaff's 
chaff of the men he is robbing. " On, Bacons, on ! 
What, ye knaves ? " etc. To call the travelers " Ba- 
cons" because Avell-fed, certainly seems a forced use 
of language. But Mr. Donnelly is picked out as no 
sort of a critic, but rather an inexpressible simple- 
ton, for remarking that it does not seem a term of 
contumely, such as Falstaff would naturally use, and 
hence is brought in somewhat arbitrarilv for the 
sake of getting the word. After all, it is only a mat- 
ter of opinion, and the point to be settled is whether 
'^Bacons," used as an epithet, does not denote a con- 
straint of language, which it surely seems to do. If 
it does not, Mr. Donnelly is not, therefore, proved 
a fool, as his critic ought to know. 

" These," says Mr. Clapp, summing up at this point, 
"a-re ^specimen bricks' from the edifice of ]\[r. 



58 MR, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 

Donnelly's argument.^' It is no dearest foe of the 
charming critic of the Advertiser — it is himself, per- 
haps, in this, his own worst enemy, who thus pre- 
sents him in the character of the comic numbskull 
of Aristophanes, who comes in upon tlie stage, amidst 
the laughter of the ages, offering a brick from the 
core as a specimen of the marble temple. One would 
think so bright a man would never choose to follow 
in the footsteps of such an illustrious predecessor as 
the farcial old sholastikos. Surely a few of the 
minor components of a book, much less its possible 
mistakes, can not be justly held to represent the en- 
tire structure. And wliat are these ^'specimen 
bricks'^ from the Donnelly edifice ? Six little errors, 
all but one doubtful, and three of them Mr. Clapp's 
own! All else of varied and solid excellence abso- 
lutel}^ ignored. 

As if, at this stage of the indictment, he mis- 
gave himself that his basis for condemnation was too 
meager, he proceeds to strengthen it by another 
instance of the author's '' ignorance and folly," 
which he thinks establishes the mental kinship of 
Mr. Donnelly to Lord Dundreary. In detailing 
how he worked out the cipher, Mr. Donnelly relates, 
with a good deal of naivete, how he discovered (thus 
avoiding being led into a plausible error) that 
because the tenth word of a column from the top 
is word ten, you can not, therefore, obtain the tenth 
word from the bottom of a column by simply sub- 
tracting ten from the whole number. He speaks of 
this as " a curious fact," which it certainly is in the 
sense of the word as he uses it, that is, odd, though, 
of course, like everybody else, he knows the very 



MR. DONNELLY' S REYIEWEUS. 59 

simple and obvious rationale of it. But Mr. Clapp, 
intent upon letting loose the theater guffaw upon 
him, commences operations by quoting his word 
" curious " in capitals, — a paltry little trick, which 
has the effect of giving to a lightly used term a 
solemnity of import which makes its author seem 
ridiculous. He then proceeds to establish Mr. Don- 
nelly's likeness as a reasoner to the stage Dundreary, 
who counts five fingers on his right hand, counts 
backward the other five from the tenth finger, adds 
the numeral six thus obtained to the five, and asks, 
" Where's the other finger?" This stroke of comic 
sophistry, offered as ironical argument, may make 
the groundlings laugh, but must make the judicious 
grieve. • Mr. Clapp, in truth, should have been 
ashamed to offer it, for he knows perfectly well that 
it establishes, in seriousness, no parallel between the 
bright author of Atlantis and the poor softie of the 
upper ten ; and that the one taking care against con- 
founding counting with subtraction is.no twin to the 
other, puzzling himself with a figment of his own 
inanity. 

The smart verbiage against the validity of the 
cipher which follows is trifling in quantity and 
quality, and may be passed over until Mr. Clapp 
has swept aside Messrs. Colbert and Bidder, who 
are decidedly lions in his way. His whole article, 
of over two columns, is composed entirely of the 
petty cavils I have cited, and three or four others no 
more important. For example, that Mr. Donnelly 
can not have found a Baconian cipher, because Bacon 
says that a cipher, meaning a cipher in general, 
"should be easy and not laborious to write,'' whereas 



60 MR. DOMNELL Y ' .5' RE VIE WEES. 

the insertion of this .vrn 1 have cost the assiduous 
labor of mo ths. As : a storj containing 

tlie marvel :^ >: : L i:'e and times, of 

which the iiis: t v areas yet given 

were not wor:l assiduous labor :hs. As, 

if the "easy'' cipiiers mentioned in ti.- _D, A-['Tii'.^n- 
tis^ precluded difficult cipiiers. when a '^^a - --crecy 
became necessary! As ii Eacon ^a/^ a:; :a-a]:ion 
anoilier class of ciphers s: ^ / : a a :.- L- says. 
tliey " - :"""'^T "^. ^ '^ '' \ . Forexaaa '- ^;a in. 

:ia:a i-:^^ : . . :^_ .. ; . . .- a^r Air. I'^:: :o 

kinds, this being one c»t jlr. Appleron 3iorga\n's 
. -■:'':nes. As ''1 rh^ terribly C'\\ ■ ' ■- ^ 

_a.:a :- ^ rex: pievcnitd it from Lr_^_ ___... .r :_3 
rec^ a.._T oi Dante's ciphers, some of which the 
elder Ec'-: a^ x^ ^ ! As if Montaigne, in 

"^^- ---;' - ^ -^^.ai v:a:a r: I think, a 

; ci -'^' - a.^ nlnvs 

which ^:.: ais verv liia: i^jEc'. " I have xaown 

authors wh-. \ "^ a. have aaa Varh 

title and lortuuf. v-l ^^.-'j.vii L...c.r appreaa .. aa:'^"^ 
purposely corrnjyt th^ir ^fyJ-^^ and affect ign'_^:._,T .^ 
so vulgar a quahty." 

But enough. It can be admart^d that Mr. C^ 
has ma':''? ^^? ais article a poignaat omeE^^^ ':'a. ..a:: 
eg^'s . _ ai a mare's nest. His ]u_:„__ ^ -^ is a 
jxiipable aosurdiry c^: :: h::le absurdities. 

E::-^ main wonder ala a- tliat any considerable 

na.moer of pe":'r'le sla_;^-- _:ave swa'"'''Wprl ir. for it 
appears that i: i:.a- ::cr:i gr-aEy a^/ _ A that 

its ''specimen bricks" were considered to have 
quite demolished the ^E/"-'//^ E ' . In Boston. 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 61 

and the many satellite towns which surround that 
urban planet, it seems to have divided admiration 
with a two-and-a-half column article, small type, in 
the Daily Globe of May 27, full of " specimen 
bricks " to throw at Mr. Donnelly, and much heralded 
as the work of Mr. George H. Richardson. I read 
this production attentively, and forbear descant on 
its elaborate impotence. One of its admirers called 
it " the death-knell of Donnelly's volume," which 
made me think of the sonorous bell invented by a 
man in Pennsylvania, composed of a sheep's trotter 
hung in an old felt hat. The solemn tolling of such 
an instrument would be akin to '^ the death-knell of 
Donnelly's volume" sounded by this ringing review. 

VIII. 

Another of " the best judges" is the reviewer of 
the New York Herald (May 6,) who occupies five 
mortal columns, small type, in deploying the variety 
and extent of his misinformation on Bacon- 
Shakespeare matters in general. The article is appar- 
ently not written by one of the Herald staff, 
a racy tribe, but by some one of the class known 
ironicallv as " literarv fellers." Nothinn^ more mis- 
leading has probably been published, and one mar- 
vels that the magnificent circulation of the Herald 
should have been given to the dissemination of such 
egregious flubdub. The radical ignorance wliicli 
pervades the whole composition like a vicious luunor, 
and breaks out everywhere in a copious rash of 
sophisms, falsehoods and perversions, is illustrated 
by a single rejoinder, which aims to combine serious 
fact with withering witticism. Mr. Donnelly had 
mentioned the circumstance that the name of 



62 MR. D OS NELL Y'S BE VLE WEBS, 

Shakespeare ia the sixteenth century was considered 
the quintessence of vulgarity — ^Yhat was called 
" vile" — just as Snooks, Eamsbottom or Hogsflesh 
would be with us, and so much so that it is on record 
that a man of that name got it changed to 
*' Saunders," as one more patrician. To which the 
Herald reviewer retorts : '' What are we to think of 
the name of Bacon, which, if it does not mean Hogs- 
flesh, has no meaning whatever ? " This is con- 
sidered a calm and crushing repartee, and its com- 
placent utterer evidently thinks that the name of 
Bacon is sjmonymous with smoked pork I The name 
of Bacon derives from the beech-tree, ''beechen," 
as everybod}^ interested in such matters has long 
learned. (Consult the old antiquary, A'erstagan.) But 
what are we to think, at the outset, of the qualifi- 
cation of one of ''the best judges," who knows so 
little of the man he is writing about that he does 
not even know anything of his illustrious name, and 
fancies it idential with '• Hogsflesh " ? 

All the statements he presents are, without 
exception, of the same accurate character. One of 
his two main reasons, for believing that Bacon could 
not have written the plays, is, that to write them 
would alone have taken a lifetime; and further that 
it was not physically possible for any one man to have 
done the work attributed to these two. The facts 
to the contrary are. — first, that for at least thirt\^ 
years Bacon had no all-engrossing employment : 
secondly, that so far from occupying the allotted 
term of three-score and ten, the Shakespeare plays 
were produced between about 1590 and 1612, thus 
being scattered over a period of only twenty-two 



MR, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 63 

years; and thirdl}^, that many an author has per- 
formed, single-handed, the work of both Bacon and 
Shakespeare ; which, by a count hberal to extrava- 
gance, (each play and each treatise being considered 
•a book), would be no more than fifty volumes, and 
very slender ones at that. The count of the plays of 
^schjdus is from 90 to 100 ; of Sophocles, certainly 
115; of Calderon, 185 ; of Lope de Vega, 2,000 ; of 
the works of Voltaire, 74 volumes ; of Balzac, about 
97 ; of George Sand, 80 ; and so on. " So much for 
Buckingham;" but the rest of CoUey Gibber's line 
can not be rung in here, for the Herald reveiwer 
must have already lost his head when he entered 
upon such a statement. 

His second main reason, for believing that Bacon 
could not have written the plays, is found in the 
alleged absolute difference in the intellect of the 
two men, as shown by their respective works. I 
suppose this is the reason why the unfortunate 
Shakespereans are kept, as the sailors say, as busy 
as the devil in a gale of wind, in trying to refute 
the myriad of identities between the two in idea, 
thought, expression, vocabularj^, point of view, man- 
ner of surveying a subject, use of words peculiar to 
them, particular phrases, and even errors, which the 
wicked Baconians are forever showering upon them ; 
and which are apparently, (in many cases, indispu- 
tably), emanations from a unique mental source. 
They are always laboring to suppress or explain 
away these striking parallelisms, which would seem 
to a plain mind to indicate tliat there is no essential 
difference in the intellect of the two men, but that 
they are one and the same ; or as the very knowing 



G4 MR. DONNELLY'S REVLEWEES. 

Montaigne significantly hints, in that identical period, 
" a case of one man who presented himself for 
another." But no, they are '' accidental resem- 
blances ; " they are " simple plagiarisms ; " they are 
'^ such parallels as you can find between writers in an}^ 
age;" they are examples, as one bright bird has 
recently said, of how 3"ou can always find Bacon in 
Shakespeare, but never Shakespeare in Bacon ! These 
explanations are terribly barred by the fact that the 
parallelisms are not occasional, but exist by hun- 
dreds. Mr. Donnelly's book contains a formidable 
array of them, nearly all striking, intimate, palpable 
in identit3\ Mrs. Pott shows in her edition of the 
Promus^ a multitude of Shakespeare thoughts, 
hints, expressions, neologisms, previously existing in 
Lord Bacon's private note-book. But better than 
even these, powerful as the}^ are, are the series of 
analogies, too subtle and interior, and too massive 
and comprehensive to be accounted for as acciden- 
tal, or plagiarized, or imitated. Many of them are 
pointed out by some of the great German scholars, 
such as Gervinus, or Dr. Kuno Fischer of Heidel- 
berg. For example, that the natural history of the 
human passions, which Bacon severely criticises 
Aristotle for not supplying, broadl}^ intimates to be 
extant and an integral and necessary part of his 
own philosophy, and circumstantiallv describes, has 
been exactly produced in the plaj^s of Shakespeare. 
For another example, the lack of intimate intellect- 
ual S3nnpathv with the Greek mind, and the con- 
spicuous affinity with the Roman, in both authors. 
Again, the theor};, peculiar to both, and in both ex- 
actly the same, that character is the result of natural 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. G5 

temperament and historical position, and des- 
tiny the result of character. Further, such a point 
as the perception of the central secret of Caesar's 
mental constitution, namely, his blindness through 
self-love to danger, contempt for which threw him 
at length under the knives of the conspirators; a 
perception perfectly unique and almost miraculous 
in its penetrant subtlety, considering the coraplexit}^ 
of the make-up of the great Roman, and Avhich 
Bacon and Shakespeare have in common. And for 
another instance, equally striking and original, take 
Bacon's mention of Mark Antony, as one of onl}^ 
two signally great pubKc men who ever yielded to 
the '' mad excess of love ; " together with his saying, 
in the same essav, that love is '•sometimes like a 
siren, sometimes like a fury ;'* — the play of Antony 
and Oleopatra being written to make both of these 
propositions dramatically evident. In a word, so 
far from there being an apparently absolute differ- 
ence in the two intellects, the evidences of their 
similarity are so conspicuous and numerous, that were 
simple ignorance substituted for indurated prepos- 
session, everyone would readily conclude from them 
that Bacon and Shakespeare were only different 
names for the same man. 

Some glittering generalities the Herald reviewer 
sprays the public with in this connection, which make 
one suspect that after all, though he makes the antith- 
esis one of substantial intellect, he means that Bacoii 
and Shakespeare ai*e radically different in style or 
manner. Not as much as he fancies, as witness the 
Rev. Mr. Bengough's admirable versifications of soiiu^ 



66 MR. D ONNELL Y'S RE ] ^lE WERS. 

of Bacon^s paragraphs, given in last year's August 
number of the Bacon Journal. Here is a sample : 

"Who taught the raven in a drought to throw pebbles 
into a hoUow tree where she spied water, that the water might 
rise so that she might come to it? Who taught the bee to sail 
through such a vast sea of air, and to find the way from a field 
in flower, a great way off, to her hive? Who taught the ant to 
bite every grain of corn she buries in her hill, lest it should 
take root and grow?" — Advancement of Learning. 

Here is Mr. Bengough's rendering : 

' 'Who taught the thirsty raven in a drought, 
Espying water in a hollow tree, 
To throw in pebbles till it reached her beak? 
Who taught the bee to sail through seas of air, 
And find her far-off hive from fields in flower? 
Who taught the ant to bite each grain of corn 
She buries in her hill, lest it take root?" 
No one, not destitute of sense, can fail to see that 
only Mr. Bengough's versification was necessary to 
bring out the Shakesperean quality of Bacon's lines. 
]Srevertheless, I will never admit the fairness and 
justice, not to say common sense, of exacting an ex- 
ternal resemblance between the prose of Bacon and 
the verse of Shakespeare, until the accomplished 
Herald reviewer will show the likeness between even 
a man's own work in the two forms : — between Cole- 
ridge in his prose Aids to Eejlection and Coleridge 
in his poem Kiibla Khan '^ or Milton in his enchant- 
ing Comus. and Milton in his blaring Tetracliordon, 
Who that ever read the wonderful letters of Lord 
B3^ron, with their vast gayety and reality, their good 
salt savor of the world and life, their infinite and 
brilliant diversit\% would possibly imagine, if Childe 
Harold had been published anonymously, that all 
that somber and oceanic grandeur had swept from 



MR. DONNELLY'S BEVIEWERS. 67 

the same mind ? To exact that Bacon's prose shall 
show an exterior likeness to the Shakespeare poetry 
is supremely ridiculous, though the two will stand 
the comparison far better than most, as many a good 
scholar knows. But words are vain to express the 
utter shallowness and stupidity of insisting on the 
parallel. The Shakespereolaters, however, are doing 
it constantly. Why don't they pull out the roots of 
their hair with tweezers if they want to appear intel- 
lectual, and not resort to such futile devices as these? 

The Herald reviewer's pudding is full of plums 
in the part where he contrasts Bacon with Shakes- 
peare. One is that Bacon " pays no homage to the 
imagination," a Delphic line which means, I sup- 
pose, that in him the faculty is subordinate or non- 
existent. On the contrary. Bacon's imagination is 
tremendous. The Novum Orgamtm is the proof of 
it — a creation like a world. ''He has thought," 
says Taine, '' in the manner of artists and poets, and 
he speaks after the manner of prophets and seers." 
In his mind the imagination is the all ; the other 
faculties are the spicula, the accessories of it, and 
surcharged with its mighty magnetic life. 

Another plum is that Shakespeare's genius is 
" essentially dramatic, with all the faults and limita- 
tions of the stage." How perfectly, how eloquently, 
Charles Lamb has smashed this preposterous affirma- 
tion, in the essay where he shows how impossible of 
representation, how infinitely be^^ond all stage capac- 
ity and conditions, how absolutely addressed to the 
rapt imagination of the private reader, are the great 
plays ! No wonder that Herr Benedix can dem- 
onstrate that they violate or transcend all stage 



68 MB. DOJSfNELLl'S REVIEWERS. 

requirements ; no wonder that the stage managers 
never let the cm^tain rise on some of them, and cut, 
slash, and more or less transmogrify the others. For 
they are not " essentially dramatic," the}^ are too 
vastly ideal ; too subtle and colossal for the theater ; 
and, however much the author may be a dramatist, 
he is infinitely more a dramatist to the mind. It is 
not as a skilled plaj^wright, but as a mighty poet, 
that he has his hold upon us. 

Among the other plums is the reviewer's assertion 
that ^^ there is nothing in Bacon that might not have 
been written by dozens of philosophers since 
Aristotle." One would like to see those philos- 
ophers : Would the reviewer kindly send us up a dozen 
on the half shell? To think of the dazzling, stupendous 
panegyric piled to the one only memory of Bacon by 
the wise and great of every succeeding age and every 
land, and then to think of such an estimate and 
such reviewing! But it is quite equaled by the 
assertion following, that "there are hundreds of 
passages m Shakespeare that no man or demigod be- 
fore him could have conceived." This is pure rliodo- 
montade. Shakespeare is simply one of a limited 
number of supreme poets, just as great as he, among 
whom are Homier, ^schylus, Lucretius, Juvenal, 
the unknown author of Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel and 
Dante ; and there are no passages of his superior in 
poetic power and beauty to theirs. It is conceded 
bj^ all high criticism. 

The reviewer has one saving grace : he does not 
expressly deny the existence of the cipher story in 
the plays, as some of his impudent confreres have 
done, though he does not admit it^ and aims to flout 



MR. nONNKLLT'S MEVTEWERS. 69 

and belittle it, sneering at it as *' wretched flimsy 
ta^ttle." So far as deciphered, it is, as before said, 
a series of recitals, which begin, so to speak, in the 
middle of events, and tell of Shakespeare's lawless 
and dissolute youth ; of his raid upon Sir Thomas 
Lucy's estate; of the subsequent battle between his 
party and the gamekeepers, in which he is wounded ; 
of his flight to London and employment at the 
theater ; of his making a great hit, in due time, by 
playing Faistaff, which Bacon conceived on the sug- 
gestion of his personal appearance; of his enforced 
marriage to Ann Hathaway, who was with child by 
him ; of his gross life and maladies; of Cecil seeing 
sedition in the play of Richard 11,^ and writing to 
the Queen, denouncing both Marlowe and Shakes- 
eare as merely covers for Bacon ; of the prosecu- 
tion of Dr. Ileyward as an accomplice and the per- 
sonal assault upon him by the Queen with her 
crutch ; of the occupation of the theater by troops, 
the flight of the actors, the danger and despair of 
Bacon, the orders for the arrest and torture of 
Shakespeare, his escape to France, etc. Now why 
this extremely novel, interesting and picturesque 
narrative should be described as '' wretched, flims}^ 
tattle," no one can say, but I will engage that if it 
told in favor of Shakespeare, instead of against him, 
we should never hear a word to its discredit. And 
as the reviewer tacitly accepts, in Mr. Donnellv's 
own words, what the remainder is to contain — a 
recital of "the inner life of kings and queens, the 
highest, perhaps the basest of their kind ;" of the 
first colonization of the American continent, in 
which Bacon and Raleigh were prominent; of ^'the 



70 MR. DONXELL Y 'S BE VIE WEBS, 

Spanish Armada;'' of the war of the Huguenots 
under Henry of Xavarre against the League, in 
which several of the Ehzabethan men took part ; of 
Bacon's downfall under King James, and the rest; 
it is still more difficult to see how such a tale can be 
included under epithets of dishonor like *'* wretched 
flimsy tattle.'' 

The character given Cecil, Bacon's deadly and 
malicious enemy, is discredited by the reviewer as 
new to history. It is. he says, *'as fanciful as lago.'' 
It is nothing of the Idnd. AVhen Cecil died. Bacon, 
without naming him, drew the same character in 
his essay 0?i Deformity^ and the London reading- 
public, recognizing the portrait, laughed in scorn at 
its felicity. The reviewer represents further, as 
against the reality of the cipher, that, supposing 
Bacon to have been convicted of sedition and treason, 
the motive to destroy him '" in that liberal and whole- 
some period,'' and the power to do so, were alike 
wanting. Then how did Southwell and Campian 
come to the rack, and Xorfolk and Essex to the 
block, and a multitude of others of note suffer bloody 
and violent deaths under Elizabeth ? ** That hberal 
and wholesome period I '' God save us ! 

The reviewer admits with a curiously meek and 
helpless irrelevance all the sordid, vulgar, profane 
details of Shakespeare's personal life and surround- 
ings at Stratford, as indeed he must, for they have 
been mainly accumulated by the greatest Shakes- 
peare scholars, men like Halhwell-Phillips, How- 
ard Staunton, and others ; and the Baconians have 
had nothing to do with gathering them. They are 
entirelv unrelieved, as those of his later life also 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 71 

are, by detail of a higher and purer moral quality; 
and it is a nice reviewer that, liaving to admit them, 
thinks he can make them compatible with Shakes- 
peare's reputed genius and the vast exaltation of 
the plays. The anomaly they constitute is solitary 
in the history of literature, and has made every 
thinker recoil. 

A fumbling and nerveless effort is next made to 
maintain that learning was as accessible to Shakes- 
peare as to Chatterton and Burns, and that he had 
acquired it. Everyone who knows anything of the 
conditions of that time, knows that the difficulties of 
such an acquisition were far greater then than now ; 
but no man in anytime, especially Elizabeth's, could 
get learning without leaving a trail. Shakespeare 
has left none. From the filthy, savage, bookless 
hole of a town where he had passed a rough, wild 
youth, he comes to London, and before long produces 
an extended poem in the most elegant English of his 
time, without a trace of the uncouth Warwickshire 
dialect, full of classic reminiscence and allusion, and 
redolent of classic grace and charm. How could he 
have done it ? It is impossible. He was not the 
man. And what have Burns and Chatterton to do 
with the case? We know just what they were 
taught, and how, and where. They were not learned 
at all ; they were only fairly educated, and their attai n- 
ments were no more than commensurate with their 
literary achievement. Burns was simply a fine lyric 
poet, exquisite in his Ayrshire dialect, commonplace 
in English ; his whole inerit, apart from his sturdy 
manliness, lying in his command of a wild sk3''lark 
music — a power of verbal lilt hardly comparable. 



72 ME. D OXNELL Y ' 5 RE T 'IE WEBS. 

Chatterton was an unearthly boy, with a marvelous 
faculty for catching the spirit and tone of antique 
poems, which he imitated in forgeries, not quite 
skillful enough to escape detection. What parallel is 
there between them and the continental Shakes- 
peare I What analogy between their known acquire- 
ment, such as it is, and the unaccountable learnins: 
of the plays, which is prodigious in every direction ; 
which, as Miss Bacon nobly says, lies thickly strewn 
on the surface of all the earlier plays, and in the 
later has disolved and gone into the clear intelli- 
gence i Take but a smgle province: law. Better 
than Lord Campbell, Mr. Eushton of Liverpool, has, 
if the lapse of years lets me remember rightly, 
shown Shakespeare's involved mastery of all the 
depths and breadths of English jurisprudence ; and 
others, Uke Armitage Brown, that he even knew the 
local law of French and Italian towns. A marvel of 
it, too, is that it is always accurate. He is the only 
signal instance of a literary man who has touched 
law without blunders. Godwin was a powerful and 
highly trained mind, but his novel, Caleb WilliamSj 
is a legal impossibility, with its hero tried again for 
a murder of which he had been once acquitted I 
Thackeray, so worldly wise and knowing, makes 
property fail of the heir, because the donor in dying 
leaves only his clearly attested oral desire as to its 
disposition: — a ruling at which all the wise old owls 
of the Bench would hoot in chorus. So with all 
English writers, however blight, who have dabbled 
in law. Shakespeare alone is unimpeachable. 
Where did be get this mighty erudition i Genius, 
however great, could not give it to him. It comes 



ME. DONNELLY'S REVLEWER8. 73 

alone by hard and special study. "Where and how 
could he make that study without leaving a record ? 
And where did he get the learning to enable him to 
acquire the learning ? For in that time the law was 
all in Norman- French, law Latin or barbarous Latin- 
ized English. The law of the immediate past, as in 
the great treatises, such as Glanville and Bracton, 
was wholly in law Latin. The year books, or re- 
ports of cases, from Edward I. to Llenry YIIL, a 
period of over 200 years, and following them the 
reports or commentaries of Coke, Plowden, Dyer, 
reaching to the times of Elizabeth and James, were 
in If or man -French. The elaborate and intimate 
satire in Hamlet^ of the proceedings in the case of 
Hales V. Petit^ involved a knowledge of the report in 
Plowden, where it appears in that language. What- 
ever else there was of law, outside of the French and 
Latin, was in an EngHsh so crabbed with Latinized 
terms that none but lawyers could understand it. 
What trace has the man Shakespeare left, what 
trace could he fail to leave, of his struggle to 
acquire these tongues ? And 3^et we are told of his 
similitude to Chatterton and Burns ! Go in peace. 
Herald reviewer ! The man that knew that world 
of law, that knew all those other worlds of learning, 
was not a Chatterton, nor a Burns; nor was he by 
any discoverable sign or token, the man of Stratford 
either. 

It is not ingenuous in the reviewer to sneeringly 
term, at a later stage of his article, the details of 
Shakespeare's early life in London, Mr. Donnelly's 
'^ discoveries." They are not his discoveries at all, 
save in circumstantiality; but substantially the vulgar 



?^ MB. DOyXELLTS EEVIEWERS. 

facts collected by all the Shakesi)eare scholars 
from Theobald, Malone and Stevens downward ; and 
all that Mr. Donnelly makes of them is to put them 
forward as palpabU^ incongruous with the claims 
made for Shakespeare's august genius; though his 
critic states, without the least warrant, that they are 
brought up as so many slop pails to empt}^ over the 
poor young scamp of Stratford. He thinks Shakes- 
peare could not have been the baddish youth Mr. 
Donnell}^, together with the students and the facts, 
finds him. because when he arrived in London, a 
famished runaway, he did not at once become a foot- 
pad and take the crooked path to the gallows. He 
holds him sinofularlv couraoreous and noble because 
he married the woman he had wronged, and 
held horses at the theater for a living, instead of 
deserting her and makino: straiofht for Tvburn. 
Although the marriage seems to have been compul- 
sory, and the horse-holding as lucrative as necessary, 
his course, as nobody denies, was commendable 
enough, though not deserving of the preposterously 
fervent eulogies of the reviewer, who even calls his 
very ordinary good conduct, "' Shakesperean." Far 
less commendatory, though stoutly defended as by a 
true devil's attorney, is his outrageous usury : so 
outrageous that it seems to have become a public 
scandal at the time, and subjected him to the flings 
of his acquaintance, and the biting mockery of the 
Ratsei pamphleteer. To this it appears must also 
be added skinflint avarice and miserly parsimony. 
All of it the reviewer excuses and defends, even ex- 
tols, as '* eminently Shakesperean,'- on the ground 
that Shakespeare had to make money ; that it was 



MR. D ONNELL Y'S RE VIE WERS, 75 

his own no matter how gotten, and that he had a 
right to be as usurious as he pleased. To complete 
the defense other literary men are spattered — Vol- 
taire for his perfectly legitimate speculations ; Words- 
worth for nobly requiring his guests to pay for other 
food than he had means to give them ; Byron for 
wanting money that he had grandly earned, etc. 
Therefore are they put into the category of the 
Stratford Shylock. In addition, the reviewer, of 
course, must include in this rogues' gallery, Bacon, 
for " taking bribes," a charge which is the stock in 
trade of Shakesperean sciolists, and simply an ignor- 
ant lie. It is fairly in consonance with these gallant 
pleas that Shakespeare, when living at the great 
New Place, and nuzzling in wealth, should be de- 
fended for increasing his slender income by using 
the fine mansion, which afterward lodged a princess, 
for the brewing of malt and its sale to lowly custom- 
ers. The defense is made to include his furnishing 
a clergyman, his guest, with sack and claret and 
making the town pay for them. Of course, Mr. 
Donnelly only cites these actions, not to object to 
them as such, but to put their petty sordor and mean- 
ness in proper contrast with the histrous character 
accorded to the great poet. The incongruity would 
seem apparent. Imagine the magnificent Raleigh 
personally brewing and selling malt in Durham 
House. Fancy the majestic Verulam trying liis 
hand at it in the kitchens of Gorhamburv. And 
Shakespeare before the ages has a port no less ideal 
and lofty than these. But no, says tlie ITerald re- 
viewer, there is no incompatibility ; the only ques- 
tion is: ''Was Shakespeare's beer well bi*ewcd; 



76 3IE. DONNELLY'S REVIEWEB8. 

was the malt honest, and did he give good measure ?" 
And he charges that Shakespeare, — engaged in the 
picayune business of brewing, like Burns' Willie, '' a 
peclc of malt" in his own fine house, and peddling it 
out to his poor neighbors, — is actually " accused (by 
Mr. Donnelly) of engaging in an honest employment 
and selling the results of his industry for gain !" Then, 
to clinch the assertion that picking up pennies, by 
making and selling malt in the grand family house, 
is an action on the part of the opulent Shakespeare 
not at all mean in itself, nor out of keeping with the 
grandeur of his genius, we are reminded that the 
•^shining Prince Bismarck" derives an income from 
the making of whisky. If this be true, it is no more 
than might be expected from the ^^^'Z^loving old 
wehr-wolf, who has turned sad Europe into a camp, 
and would fain make his bloody ravin on Eepublics ; 
but it forms no sort of excuse for the shabby dis- 
grace of the man Shakespeare. 

The attempt to impugn Mr. Donnelly for criticis- 
ing Shakespeare's dishonest attempt to edge into the 
aristocracy by fraudulently obtaining a coat of arms 
from the Herald's College, is nothing but a bit of 
awkward shuffling with words. Shakespeare is not 
accused of seeking social elevation ; he is accused, 
and, what is more, convicted, of trying, with the aid 
of John Dethick, a rascally Garter King at Arms, to 
gat armorial bearings by fraud and falsehood. The 
evidence in the matter is fully given, with fatal 
candor, by Halliwell-Phillips, the highest modern 
Shakespeare authorit}^, and also in full detail by 
Howard Staunton, an equallj^ unimpeachable scholar. 

The five columns of calumniation which compose 
the review end with something truly beautiful. The 



MR. BOyNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 77 

writer is descanting on the mystery which surrounds 
the personality of Shalvespeare. We know all about 
the other great men of the time. Essex, Bacon, 
Raleigh, Casaubon, Sidney, are, he says, perfect in- 
dividualities to us. But when we look at Shakes- 
peare, the hgure is dim. We see, what ? ''Only the 
light!" This is certainly lovely. I remember that 
at the time of Thackeray's death, some cliarming 
verses, with the same idea, I think by Mr. Stoddard, 
appeared*in one of the journals. The poet beholds 
the laureled ones in their Valhalla : there is Homer, 
there is Dante, there are they all, one by one, and 

there 

^^ There — little seen but light — 
The only Shakespeare is." 

It is a graceful fancy, but as a means of account- 
ing for the absence of information about a man it 
is certainly novel. To the ordinary mind, the 
''light" about the personal Shakespeare is verv much 
like the light seen about a bad lobster in a dai'k 
cellar, and, to one conversant with the details of his 
unsavory biography, there is a smell also. The talk 
about his obscurity is utter fustian. In the first 
place, such a man as he coiddnot be obscure. Living 
in the midst of a crowded center like London, and 
his reputed plays enjoying a great popularity, he 
would become at once the object of intense curiosity, 
and everything would be known about him that there 
was to know. Any person of gumption must feel 
that if we have not learned something different in 
kind about him, it is because there is no more to 
learn. But secondly, it is not true that Ave are Avith- 
out his memoirs; we have an ample biographv of 



78 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 

him, and, if it is perplexing, it is only because it is 
misread, or its significance evaded. The labors of 
the Shakespeare society, and of numerous scholars 
and antiquaries, in several countries, have resulted in 
a considerable mound of details ; and if much of this 
is only traditional, it must be borne in mind that 
genuine tradition, as, if I remember rightly. Sir 
George Cornewall Lewis has superbly proved, 
possesses all the force of history. The only trouble 
with the Shakespeare biography is that it Is all one 
way in kind ; and whenever any new particulars are 
brought to light, they are invariably of the same 
sort, and leave the biography still all one way. In 
a word, the zealous labors of his friends, for two cen- 
turies, have only shown that personally he was a 
perfect vulgarian. There is no getting away from 
the fact, and it is as idle to say that we have not 
the fullest evidence of it, as it is that we are so 
deficient in our knowledge of him as to see nothing 
but the light of his reputed w^orks, when w^e look in 
his direction. And to refer the absence of creditable 
information respecting him to his personal modesty, 
and a desire to keep in the background, is particu- 
larly fine in the Herald reviewer, fresh from allow- 
ing and justifying his attempt to render himself ex- 
ceedingly conspicuous by getting a grant of nobility 
from the armorial college ! It is also particularly 
fine in the reviewer to assert that the tone in which 
'' he was addressed by those who knew him w^as in- 
variably that of awe." Bacon, indeed, as his sour 
contemporary Osborne relates of him, " struck all 
men with an awful reverence ; " and Ben Jonson 
shows him to us at his birthday festival, " standing 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVLEWERS, 79 

amidst the smile of the fires, the wine, the men, as 
if he did a mystery." But how many are they, who 
knew the man Skakespeare, to speak of him other 
than with disrespect and contempt ? " Stageplayer ! 
Mummer ! " — His kinsman, Eye Quyney, hisses at 
him w^hen denied, I beheve, a loan. " An upstart 
crow ... in his own conceit the only Shake-scene 
in the country," snarls Greene. " One who feeds on 
men," the bitter ghost of Ratsei brands him. Mani- 
festly feigning in his verse, in his prose Ben Jonson 
speaks of him only as an actor, (strange that this 
manifest fact has not been noticed,) patronizes him, 
with marked superciliousness, flouts at him, mocks 
at his blundering tongue, says his talk had often to be 
"snuffed out/' excuses his shortcomings with good- 
natured half-contempt, vents on him praise in 
pompous irony. Where is the " awe ? " Sometimes, 
it is true, he is mentioned pleasantly. Henrj^ Chettle, 
writing very diplomatically and guardedly, as one 
who knew of him only or mainly by report, speaks of 
him as an excellent actor, as known for "his 
facetious grace in writing," and in good repute for 
fair dealing. But who is he that ever mentioned 
him in a tone of " awe ? " 

Such is the reviewer, who has the advantage of 
five columns in a widely spread journal, to injure 
Mr. Donnelly's book by specious defamation. The 
fact tliat the greater number of people are not, and 
can not be expected to be conversant with the facts 
of the matter, and can therefore be misled by the 
falsest representations, is the only consideration 
which renders the article of the slightest importance. 
That a work of sterling e:5^ce]lence and value should 



80 MB. nONl^^BLLT'S MEYIEWERS. 

be subject to the assault, and receive the injury of 
such a Jack o' lantern brigade of lies, is sufficient 
comment on the precious system of reviewing. 

IX. 

Another of '' the best judges " is the very nearly 
three-column judge of the New York Tribune (May 
13). In Anstey's extremely original and amusing 
novel, The Fallen Idol^ a great effect is produced by 
the author insisting on the perpetual diabolic expres- 
sion of the carven image, which seems to suggest 
something sentient, something at once living and 
dead, and through all the maze of the story, is ever 
present to the mind of the reader. An exactly 
similar, supercihous, infernal, immobile smirk 
seems immutably fixed on the physiognomy of this 
amiable article. The author appears to aim at 
conquering, not by his facts, which, like the darkey's, 
are false, nor by his arguments, which are of the 
infant school, but by an overbearing smug serenity 
of literary deportment, which is truly insufferable. 
He is calm, he is satisfied, he is softly simpering, he 
is inexpressibly superior, and he fronts what he 
thinks the poor little doggish group of Baconians, as 
Memnon fronts the generations. Through all the 
monotonous, imperturbable, condesending flow of 
his bland babble runs still an under murmur, telling 
of their abjectness, their worthlessness, their insan- 
ity, their blindness; and yet they have seemed, 
even to some of their antagonists, no mconsiderable 
beings. We need not allude to the great number of 
intellectual and accomplished men and women in 
private life who accept this theory. We need not 
even mention the formal advocates, such as Delia 



MR DONNELLY'S nEVlEWEBS. 81 

Bacon, with her noble clouded ideality, struck 
through with such lightnings of insight as seldom 
make splendid any brain ; nor Judge Holmes, with 
his solid learning and sterling sense, whose book a 
Tribune reviewer had once to brassily falsify before 
he could even try to answer; nor even Mrs. Pott, 
whose marvelous power of patient research, equal in 
itself to genius, is coupled with the most delicate 
and unerring perception. But there is Leconte de 
Lisle, incomparable but for Victor Hugo, among the 
French poets, who has the dazzling honor of being 
the successor to Yictor Hugo's chair in the French 
Academy, and he has declared unequivocally against 
the Shakespereans. There is Dr. Kuno Fischer, of 
Heidelberg, illustrious now above the modern Ger- 
man philosophers, as the expounder of Kant, who, 
not long since, was announced to lecture in support 
of the Baconian theory. There is James Nasmyth, 
the broad-brained Scotchman, famous as an astrono- 
mer, the inventor of the steam pile-driver, the steam 
hammer, improved ordnance, telescopes, what not, 
whose practical mind saw the same truth. There is 
Lord Palmerston, the embodiment of the strong 
British common sense, and he, too, was a Baconian. 
There is Sir Patrick Colquhoun, one of tlie most 
eminent of English publicists, who has added his 
name to the Baconian roster by his lecture, a couple 
of years since, before the Eoyal Society of Litera- 
ture in London. There, as said already, is Charlotte 
Cushman, the powerful actress, whom the stage and 
the play-goer will long remember. Tliere is General 
Butler (O rare Ben Butler !),Avhose full mental worth 
will not be known until some publisher has the wit 



MB. DONNELLT'S REVIEWERS. 



to urge him to collect into a volume his trenchant 
literary essays, such as his cogent defense of the 
slandered Byron. And there, to go no further, is 
that justice of our Suprejne Court, who most in mind 
resembles Marshall, and who long since gave in his 
adhesion, on judicial grounds, to the cause of Bacon. 
But no; the Tribune reviewer sees them onlv to 
contemn; he survej^s them from aloft, with his 
supercilious. Fallen Idol^ conceited smirk and stare ; 
his style puts on for them the gold-rimmed monocle, 
the contumelious single eye-glass ; for him they are 
" the Baconians ; " and with unrelenting calm, he 
breathes out, in his dead-level societ}^ voice, that 
their minds are " abnormally constituted,'' that 
they are all "• narrowness and triviality ; '' above all, 
that they are ^'* color-blind." This withering epithet 
he thinks so felicitous that he repeats it no less than 
six times in his comparatively short article ; and lest 
its natural force be abated, he explains that ''mental 
color-blindness consists in inability to distinguish 
between strongly opposed literary styles; between 
radically different intellectual expressions." Thus, 
we suppose, that when the ''abnormally consti- 
tuted" Baconian notes that Bacon says that 
Aristotle thinks J^oung men unfit to hear moral 
philosophy, and that Shakespeare also says that 
Aristotle thinks young men unfit to hear moral philos- 
ophy, and that the error of using the word 
" moral " instead of " political " is committed by 
both Bacon and Shakespeare, it only shows that he 
is "color-blind" — that is, unable "to distinguish 
between radically different intellectual expressions ! " 
And when the " narrow and trivial " Baconian rolls 



MR. DONNELLY \S REVIEWERS. 83 

up page upon page of twin locutions, epigrams, 
metaphors, axioms, proverbs and apothegms from 
Bacon and Shakespeare, which are palpably diffei^ent 
modes of the same mind, and just as much alike as 
Bacon speaking prose and Bacon intoning verse, 
each citation only further shows that he is '^color- 
blind" — that is, unable to '^distinguish between 
strongly opposed literary styles ! " But for a full 
rejoinder, it is quite sufficient to think of the shining 
list of Baconians I have named — Leconte de Lisle, 
Palmerston, Kuno Fischer, Nasmy th, and the rest, — 
and to imagine persons, so sane and strong in intel- 
lect as they, stigmatized as '' abnormallj^ consti- 
tuted," full of '' narrowness and triviality," and so 
'^ mentally color-blind " that they can not tell one 
thing from another, all by such a little Hindu 
eidolon as this Tribune reviewer ! 

Further on, with the air of one who has invented 
and orders up the terrible Zalinski gun, which on 
its first trial scooped with a single shot a cavern in 
a cliff, he brings in for the demolition of the Bacon- 
ians, the formidable Dr. Ingleby, whom he calls ^' a 
ripe Shakesperean scholar." To wheel up and un- 
limber such an oracle is truly unfortunate. Of all 
the '' ripe Shakesperean scholars," Dr. Ingleby is the 
one that has the least force, and is weak even to 
silliness. His quality is shown by his most famous 
hook, the Oenturie of Prayse^ in which he aims to 
show how truly great Shakespeare was; and, indi- 
rectly, how certainly he was the authoi* of the 
plays, by citing all the references made to him, and 
his reputed works, during tw^^nty -three yeai's of his 
life, and for seventy-seven years after his death. 



Si 



JfE. DOXXELL YS REVIEWERS. 



These references he calls " praise/ * Here are speci- 
mens of some that he inclndes under this title. His 
book not being at hand. I quote from a volume in 
which they are collated by one* who holds him in 
veneration. 

*• William Payne, in 1642, says * Shakes|>eare's 
plays are better prmted than most Bibles.' " Praise ! 

'• George Peele. in 1607, mentions * Venus and 
Adonis.' " Praise ! 

' Til riias Eobinson, in 1630, describing the life 
of a monk, says • After supper it is usual for him 
to read a little of Venus and Adonis, or some such 
scuiTilous book.' " Praise I 

•A manuscript journal of the Duke of Wurtem- 
berg says, Apidl 30, 1610, ^They play the Moor of 
Venice at the Globe? ^ More praise ! 

*• In a funeral song by Sir William Harbert, in 
1594, Shakespeare is rebuked for going into foreign 
countries for the subiects of his verse/' StUl more 
praise ! 

^' In Mereurius Bmttanicus some one writes. 1644, 
of ' Ben Jonson and his unek Shakespeare.' " 
Praise unspeakable ! 

There are a great many more entries of the same 
kind. If such tributes do not show Shakespeare's 
greatness, and prove that Lord Bacon did not write 
the plays, nothing wiU. Of these references there 
are 1S5. Fifty-seven of them were made during 
Shakespeare's lifetime. Of course a number of 
them are complimentarv. thouorb, innearlv everv in- 
stance, as conventionally so as stock puflfs: and 
scarcely any of them— tcven by hard sti'aining, not 
more than a dozen — refer to the man, but only to 



MP,. DONNELLY'S REVLEWERS. 85 

the books ascribed to him. What theh^ collector 
thinks he proves by them, and why the merely com- 
mon-place and derogatory ones are included under 
the caption of '' Praise " is a mystery. The book, in 
fact, has no earthly merit or significance. It simiDly 
shows the calibre of Dr. Ingleby. 

A couple of quotations from this redoubtable 
man are considered sufficient to crush the Baconians, 
including Mr. Donnelly. One is where he com- 
])ares them to Macadam's sieves, " which retain onl}^ 
those ingredients unsuited to the end in view." 
This liappy simile is perfectly characteristic of Dr. 
Ingleby, and it is evident that the Tribune reviewer 
admires and loves him for itsfehcity. But 'Hhe end 
in view" is to macadamize the road, and does Dr. 
Ingleby or the reviewer really think it a fault in the 
sieve that it holds back the materials that are not fit 
for the purpose ? It is a plain road — ^' as common 
as the way between St. Alban's and London" — 
(which it is !) and the Baconians are to make it pass- 
able; is it, cause for censure that, like Macadam's 
sieves, they screen out only the proper material for 
the end in view? Less commendable surely are 
those sieves, not like Macadam's, wherewith Shakes- 
pereans accumulate irrelevant and worthless stuff for 
their work, like the Centitrie ofPrayse of Dr. Ingleby. 

The other passage which the reviewer quotes, 
from this fine satirist, is one in which, to cite it briefly, 
he finds Lord Bacon so deficient '' in human sympa- 
thies," that he could not possibly portray a woman 
like Miranda, Perdita, Cordelia, oranyof tlie others; 
and hence to a 'nhorougldy sane intelligence," mod- 
estly implied to 1)(^ the reviewer's own, is separated 



86 Mil DONNELLY'S EEVIEWEliS. 

'^ by an impassable gulf" from the mind that wrote 
the plays. The delicate ^'Imman sympathies" 
shown by Shakespeare in regard to women, from 
Ann Hathaway to the wife of the inn-keeper Dave- 
nant, are attested by the whole tradition about him, 
and of course prove his utter qualification for such 
portrayals. Strange, however, we may say in pass- 
ing, that the beautiful passages in the third scene of 
the fourth act of the Winte^'^s Tale, where the names 
of the flowers, their character, their seasonable order, 
and the sequences in which they are mentioned, are 
so much the same as in Bacon's essay O^i Gardens, 
that the wondrous parallel deeply impressed even 
Spedding, who was no Baconian;— strange that these 
passages are put into the mouth, and make an 
integral part of the personality of the exquisite 
Perdita, whom Dr. Ingleby and his admirer think 
Bacon could not have portrayed. 

To re-enforce heavy artillery with small musketry 
seems a useless expenditure of ammunition, but this 
the reviewer does, by here bringing in Eichard Grant 
"White to corroborate Dr. Ingleby as to Bacon's want 
of "human sympathies;" — a man who, as I have 
said, was a secret Baconian, and secret onlv because 
a frank avowal of his disbelief in Shakespeare would 
have made his editions waste paper. O these Shakes- 
pereans! This is the way they can estimate the 
man who declared his own nature when he wrote in 
his essa}^ on Friendship, " For a crowd is not com- 
pany, and men's faces are but like pictures in a 
gallery, and talk only a tinkling cymbal, where there 
is no love." Here is their latest fetch — to pronounce 
''deficient in human sympathies" that all-compas- 
sionate Bacon whose paramount interest was in 



Mil. DONNELLY'S llEYLEWERS. 87 

humanity; whose deepest intuitions and divinations, 
as his Essays show, are w^hen he comes into relation 
with his fellows ; whose whole life was avowedly and 
admittedly devoted, in his own sublime words, to 
'Hhe relief of the human estate;" he, the kniirht- 
errant, solitary and colossal, of the human adven- 
ture ; he, the very Cid Campeador of the vast scien- 
tific battle, still raging, for the victory of the human 
kind ! The world has long agreed Avith Vanvenar- 
gues that '^ great thoughts come from the heart," and 
to think that there should be men so dull as to 
set up that the great thoughts of Bacon — none 
greater — had no heart to come from ! The theme is 
too much to handle here, but the student of his life 
can not but at once remember some of its salient 
points, and marvel that he should be taxed with the 
lack of all that makes a man most a man. To think 
of his fond and deep rapport with his great brother, 
Anthony : — '^ my comfort," he sweetly calls him ; and 
later in life, denotes him with rapt feeling as ''my 
dear brother, who is now with God." To think of 
his unfailing, his tender and anxious efforts to pro- 
tect, to succor and save his poor young Catholic 
friend, the son of the Bishop of Durham, Sir Tobie 
Mathew ; how, wdien all faces lowered around the 
young man in his prison, when even his father and 
mother forsook him as ''a pervert," he would not 
cast him out; how from the jail in Avliich his con- 
science cast him^ he took him to his own house and 
cherished him; how when in gathering danger, 
thouo^h innocent, from suspicion of complicity with 
the frightful plot of Catesby and Guy Fawkes, he 
aided his escape abroad ; how he maintained a faithful 



MR. DOXXELLY'S REVIEWERS. 



and consoling friendship with the poor outlaw 
throuo'h all the vears of that sorrowful forei^'n 
sojourn ; and how, at length, through loyal and un- 
tiring endeavor, he procured for him permission to 
return to his own England, and eat no more that 
bread of exile Dante foimd so bitter. And at last, 
when all was ending, to think how that high heart 
turned from the many-passioned pageant of service 
and struggle and glory and noble anguish, which had 
been his life on earth, from all the airy vision of his 
immeasurable coming fame and the hopes of 
heaven, to humbly and with touching pathos leave 
on record his wish to be buried in the old church at 
St. Albans, for ** there" he says, ''was my mother 
buried." and there he lies close by his mother s grave. 
O poor, great man, so wanting in *' human sym- 
pathies I " 

The reviewer continues his supercilious but wise 
and learned efforts to wreak mischief on ^Ir. Don- 
nelly's book, by admitting that it produces '* plenty " 
of evidence that the writer of the plays was a law- 
yer, (a damaging admission, one would say, for the 
case of "William Shakespeare): but thinks this coun- 
tervailed by the '* curiously bad law in the 2Lercliant 
of Yenicep '* with which," he declares '* 2>Ir. Apple- 
ton Morgan has dealt so fully and ably that there 
is nothing more to be said about it." The refer- 
ence is to a long foot note which formed a sad blot 
in Mr. Morran's fine book vears ao:o, and Mr. Mor- 
gan it appears, continues to treat the point ''fully 
and ablv " bv recentlv calling the verdict on Shv- 
lock a '* most illegal and unrighteous judgment." 
Unrighteous I This of the verdict on the vindictive. 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 80 

tive, carnivorous, murder-seeking, pound-of-flesh old 
Jew ! As for its being '' illegal," both Mr. Morgan 
and the reviewer would do well to inquire whether 
it was so by the legal usage of an Italian court of 
the sixteenth century. Their contention is that the 
court scene in the play shows ignorance of English 
law. I read long ago a full account of the trial of 
Beatrice Cenci, and such legal proceedings as passed 
in that Koman court would certainly seem to the 
Tr^^'St^n^ reviewer a case of ''curiously bad law," if 
judged by the standards of England, and would in 
that country be impossible. In fact, the instance 
really is another proof that the writer of the 
plays was a master of jurisprudence ; that he knew, 
as his critics do not, the legal usage of continental 
courts, as well as of English ; and, most significant 
of all, that he had visited Southern Europe with the 
eye of a lawyer. For an illustration of the differ- 
ences in procedure, read Mr. J. T. Doyle's admira- 
ble paper in the Overland Montlily for July, 186(>, 
giving his curious experience in a Spanish court in 
Nicarauo^ua. For a statement of the le^'al theorv of 
the play in which it is shown how law, which is jus- 
tice, must be tempered with equity, which is mercy 
— a demonstration which only a mind as great as 
Bacon's in jurisprudence could have undertaken — 
read Judge Holmes' masterly exposition in the latest 
edition of his book on the Authorship of S/uflrs- 
peare. 

Having settled with cool nonchalance that the 
writer of the plays ''knew ver}' little law," the 
reviewer, with the same frigid ease, says that as for 
his " medical knowledge, there is no reason why he 



90 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 

could not have picked that up I*' Dr. Bucknill, one of 
the most eminent of physicians, has written a book 
on the OTeatness of that ^' medical kno^yledo:e," 
which is rather adverse to this sage suggestion. But 
doubtless the calm reviewer could see no reason why 
Dr, Bucknill might not have '' picked up " his 
medical knowledge ; and, hard, vulgar study not 
being necessary to learn the art of medicine, why 
should not Galen and Hippocrates, Rabelais and 
Sydenham, Abernethy and Astlev Cooper, Cabanis 
and Brown-Sequard, have '^ picked up" theirs also! 
From tais serene conclusion it is but an easy step, 
and with eas}^ composure is it taken, to censure 
Mr. Donnelly for ascribing to Bacon the discovery 
that heat is a mode of motion. The truth is, he 
says, that " all Bacon knew on this subject he 
derived from Plato." Fulgid Hades ! home of 
heat, where cool reviewers go to when they die! 
Plato ! If he had only said Aristotle, who really 
did have some vague idea, first, perhaps, of an}^, of 
the dynamic nature of heat, though he does not 
express it either clearly or boldly ; but Plato ! Is it, 
can it be possible, that this oracular reducer of Bacon 
to a low denomination, does not know that the doc- 
trine of heat, as a mode of motion, is derived from 
the great crucial illustration of the working of the 
Baconian method of discovery in the Xovum Orga- 
mim? For this the new instrument is put in 
motion ; at the end of the radiant processes of induc- 
tion appears this magic flower of fiame ! See the 
proud and silent tribute Tyndall renders to Bacon, 
as the annunciator of the idea, when he prints the 
glorious Baconian paragraphs at the very outset 'of 
his own noble book on the subject ! 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 01 

The antarctic airiness of the highly valuable '' best 
judge" of the Tribune is nowhere more destructive 
than where he essays to freeze out the Donnelly 
array of parallelisms by asserting their non-signifi- 
cance, as evidences of identity of authorship. It is, 
of course, manifest that parallelisms may be ac- 
counted for as plagiarisms, but where they occur in 
great quantity, as in Bacon and Shakespeare, and 
where, as in the works of these two, they are no 
more than equal to the remainder of the text in 
which they are embedded, such an explanation of 
tlieir presence is perfectly untenable. For example, 
the elegant poems of Owen Meredith are really 
Avonderful for plagiarism; he steals right and left 
from the British poets, and from the French, Italian 
and Slavic poets ; but we know that his parallehsms 
are plagiarisms, not only because we find them 
in the pages whence he appropriated them, but 
because, though his own poetry has merit, the 
splendid sentences and phrases he has taken shine 
in it Uke jewels in an ash-pan, and are out of conso- 
nance with their surroundings. It is not so with 
the parallelisms of Bacon and Shakespeare, and here 
Mr. Donnelly is plainly right. He might advance 
it as an unanswerable reason why he is right, that 
the identity of the passages is significant of a single 
authorship, not alone because they are identical, but 
because they comport in both cases with all of the 
context; grow inevitably out of it instead of being 
Inserted or stuck on ; are never above or below it ; 
achieve originality by sheer appositeness ; and, in 
short, have, in each composition, a perfect mutuality 
of relation to the whole. It is, therefore, far more 



9^ ME. D OXXELL Y'S RE VIE WEBS. 

icily superior than irrefragable, in the Trihuiie re- 
viewer, to consider Mr. DonneIl3^'s book as '' a study 
in morbid psycholog}^,'' and he himself as one to be 
valued onh" *' for therapeutic purposes,'' because he 
ranks as evidences the autorial identities he finds- 
Nor has the reviewer even any right, in reason, to 
push these supercilious and insolent phrases to the 
leno^thofstio-matizing as ''incredible absurditv " Mr. 
Donnelly-s suggestion, (it is hardly more, and only 
voices what several of us have long thought and 
some said), that Bacon is the real author behind 
Marlowe, Burton and Montaigne. Scholars who are 
not Baconians have for a great while been strangely 
stirred by what seemed the vast anticipation of 
Shakespeare in Marlowe's pages, shown always in 
the large rhythms of the Marlovian plays ; and at 
times in strikino; similarities of thouo^ht, cadence, 
and imager3\ It is not time yet to pronounce abso- 
lutely, but the learned mind of Bacon is seen pal- 
pably, though in negligee, in the Anatomy of Melan- 
choly^ a book originally issued anonymoush\ As 
for Montaigne's Essays, the evidences of Bacon's 
hand in them are so strong, so numerous, and so for- 
tified by external circumstances, that I sometimes 
wonder anyone can doubt their indication. AVhat 
does the great Dutch Scholar, Isaac Gruter, the au- 
thor of the Inscripiions, writing in a singular veiled 
style from The Hague to Dr. Kawley, Bacon's chap- 
lain, a little while, apparently, after Bacon's death, 
concerning the publication of several of his works in 
Holland — what does he refer to when he speaks of 
^' the French interpreter who patched together Lord 
Bacon's things and tacked that motley "piece to him ;'' 



MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 93 

and in the next sentence hopes to get leave to pub- 
lish ^' cqjart, that exotic work " of his lordship's ? 
What is Lord Bacon's " exotic " work, which has " a 
motley piece tacked to it " by '^ a French inter- 
preter ? " Lest the reviewer should lose his beauti- 
ful, immobile, contumelious smile by a change of 
countenance, I recommend him not to be too positive 
that that work is not the so-called Essays of Mon- 
taigne, for the contrary might be proved on him. 

There is nothing else worth remark in his criti- 
cism, except that he continues for more than a col- 
umn to the end, the supercilious assumption of cold 
superiority which alone gives such speciousness to 
his shallow and impudent platitudes, as enables them 
to injure Mr. Donnelly's book with the public. The 
value of this final column may be estimated by the 
fact that, in a large part of it, his serene thought butts 
about, like a summer beetle in a dim room, trying to 
show that the typographical peculiarities of the folio 
are not the conditions of a cipher, a point which 
distinguished cryptologists have already disposed 
of for him. Further on, with the lofty and com- 
passionate air of one who would set the poor 
idiot right, he utters the incredible and self-evident 
absurdity that, unless Bacon set up the type with his 
own hands and then read the proofs, he could not 
have got a cipher narrative into the folio without 
letting ''the whole chapel" into the secret. He 
says this, but he knows very well that if his own 
paper, the 5"rzJ?^;^^, accepted for2:)rint an article four 
columns long, every tenth word in it might make it 
a cipher narrative without any one in the oflfice, from 
the editors to the press-boys, even suspecting its true 



9i MK DOXXELL Y 'S REVIEWERS. 

character. In the case put bv Mr. Donnelly, let one 
well-paid agent, like Heminge, l>e charged hv Bacon 
to faithfully zee that the printers foDowed copy, and 
without his knowing anythiug whaterer of the 
secret writing they were putting in type, the thing 
would be done. The reviewer s ensuing account of 
the capriciousness and complexity of the cipher 
method, and his utterly unwarrantable assertion that 
the words of the text are selected to fit a precon- 
ceived story, are plain falsifications, upon which Mr. 
Donnelly's subsequent disclosure of the method by 
which his basic numbers and their modifiers are 
obtained, sets an ineffaceable brand. The same 
disclosure brings to utter mockery the crowning 
folly of the article, where he impressively parades, 
with a sort of veneration, the conclusion reached 
by Mr, Jennings in the Ptyst-Desjfatjjh; and declares, 
with an indescribable air of finality, that the 
cipher has been proved to be delusive nonsense 
by that gentleman, with his precious discovery of 
the concealed primary number 222, and its ^' buoy- 
ant and beautiful little modifier, the figure one.'' 
Considering that it has been thoroughly exploded 
by the facts, it is really edifying to see the 
reviewers cold and uppish confidence in the bursted 
bladder, and his tranquil assumption that it has 
already destroyed the Donnelly volume. Why he 
should condescend to say any more after this, is not 
known, but he does, and actually, for a brief space, gets 
very mad at Mr. Donnelly, though still preserving a 
horrible immobility in his fury, charging that he has 
made of Bacon in the cipher story an archaic 
prototype of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde; "noble, 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 95 

magnanimous, lofty -minded '' in the argument, but in 
the cipher, "' the basest, meanest, most slanderous, 
malevolent and sneaking of backbiters and calumni- 
ators." Phew! This touch brings to mind the 
scene in the Fallen Idol^ where the abominable little 
image, keeping its movelessness of visage, its satur- 
nine dead smirk, and its general impassibility, actu- 
ally yowls with rage at the attempt to bury it. The 
spurt of epithets, which corresponds in the reviewer 
to this dismal cry, is all because the cipher contains 
incidentally, in the very spirit of history, some details 
of the dissolute life of Shakespeare. But what if 
these details are true, — and tradition certainly con- 
firms them ; — are Suetonius and Tacitus to be set 
down as sneaking backbiters and calumniators be- 
cause they record the faults and follies of some of 
their contemporaries? Further on, the cipher story 
is characterized as a ^'scandalous chronicle," though 
it contains nothing either in quality or quantity that 
sets it below the immortal memoirs of Sully. Of 
course, what it has, of this kind, is but a very small 
part of the cipher story given, but the ingenuous 
reviewer is careful to suppress this truth, lest it 
might seriously qualify the appositeness of his fioiii'- 
ish about Jekyll and Hyde. 

X. 

The somewhat extended going-over to which this 
one of '' the best judges,"" credited with having killed 
Mr. Donnelly's book, has been subjected, in common 
with several of liis fellow '' judges,'' is undeilaken to 
show what kind of men have the reviewer's privilege^ ; 
and what kind of representations they dare to put 



96 MR. D OXXEL LY'S BE VIE WEES. 

forth in condemnation of the toilsome and valuable 
TTork of a reputable author. If I were in Mr. 
Donnelly's place, I would publish these reviews, 
without comment, as a supplement to every future 
copy of the G/^eat Cryptogram, that the reader rising- 
from its pages (which he would with at least deep 
res]"ect and probably conviction) might see for him- 
self the glaring mendacity of their account of the 
book he had just perused. Xo comment of mine 
could have the force of such a contrast. The articles 
referred to here are samples of a number of othei^, 
equally despicable, which have been evoked by this 
strong and splendid volume. Most of them are 
nearly or quite destitute of even average literarv 
merit, not to say of any gleam of the point and 
grace of manner which often adorn and half redeem 
the unscrupulous and shameless re^iews frequent in 
the periodicals of Europe. They are woven of 
misrepresentations, and, at best, succeed only by 
blocking up into high relief a few petty flaws and 
errors, which are non-significant, and making them 
stand for the character of the whole work. By such 
tricks, which only the professional reviewer can 
practice, they contrive to give the reader, who is 
simple enough to pay any attention to them, an 
impression of the book such as he would never 
receive, even though hostile or prejudiced, from an 
independent perusaL This latest instance of the 
ability of their writers to make one thing take on 
the semblance of another, makes me feel, as I have 
been often made to feel, the sober force of Sweden- 
borg's iron epithet, when he calls the whole triiie 
conjurers. False, even to utter worthlessness, as their 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWEB8. 97 

report of an author's work may be, it has the 
Infernal quahty of a glamour, which deceives even 
people of fair intelligence, and can often effect 
measureless injury. A gentleman who is by no 
means a fool, recently writes : ^' I was much inter- 
ested in the Great Cryptocjrain^ and intended to 
secure an early copy, but have read a very adverse 
review of it in one of the great New York journals 
and have therefore concluded not to make the 
purchase." Here is an instance of the practical 
operation of the institution. The impressive repre- 
sentations of an asinine Ananias, masquerading as a 
critic, were accepted by him without suspicion ; and 
he was deterred from procuring a valuable book, 
which undoubtedly would have given him full satis- 
faction. Multiply the instance by thousands, and 
you have an idea of the injustice wrought by the 
system of reviewing. 

The deprivation to the general reader, and the 
pecuniary injury to the author and publisher, are 
alike evident. One does not forget Emerson's radiant 
first volume, Nature^ consigned to the publishers' 
shelves, as Theodore Parker said, for twelve years 
— hardly a copy of the whole edition sold — owing 
to the hocus-pocus of the critical representations. 
Who among the readers that have felt the transfig- 
uration of that volume, — felt its effect upon the soul, 
as of a holy and immeasurable dawn, — would not 
rank it as among one of life's losses if he had been 
kept from its sweet influences by having received 
the false impressions spread abroad by periodical 
criticism? It is idle to la}^ the blame upon the 
reader, and say that he ought not to b(^ unduly 



98 MB. DOJS'NELLY'S REVIEWERS, 

affected by what the critic says of a volume. As 
things are, tlie best of us are attracted or deterred 
by what is plausibly reported of a book by a repu- 
table critical journal; andean be cheated in two 
ways, either unjustly in its favor or unjustly against 
it. 

As for the pubhshers, who are business men, I 
wonder that on mere business grounds they put up 
with the treatment they often receive from these 
road-agents. I personally know of one recent in- 
stance — and doubtless the instances are many — 
where a pile of freshly issued books was made over, 
everv week, bv the manaofino- editor to his salaried 
reviewer, with strict instructions not to praise them, 
whatever theuMnerit — without special instructions! 
Leavino- the riohts and interests of the author out 
of the question, what sort of a chance to do business 
has a publisher, subjected to such treatment as this ? 
At best, even when the dice are not thus loaded, the 
books of whose character the public is to be informed, 
are at the mercy of a critic whose temper, qualifica- 
tions and conditions are, like himself, unknown. 
Under our practice, the verdict on an eternal book, 
like Don Quixote^ Bobbison Crusoe^ or Les Jliserahles, 
which can only be justly made by '- the great variety 
of readers.'- is confided to a single, often anonymous, 
irresponsible man, whose dictum is to be accepted by 
thousands. There could be no better premium on 
adverse judgments. The critic may be an evil man, 
whose excellent dio^estion onlv stimulates his literarv 
malignity ; or he may be a good man. whose view of 
the work before him is poisoned by a dyspepsia 
which makes him feel that he has breakfasted dailv 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWEBS, 99 

on a fried handsaw, split up the back, and a half 
dozen of stewed gimlets. He may be a dunce, a 
sciolist, a snarleyyow, a dullard, a persilieur, an ossi- 
fied intelligence, a born Philistine, a man without 
perception or receptivity, generosity or equity ; one 
subject to his humors^ to moods of resistance or 
caprice, to insomnia or east winds. In any of which 
cases the fate of the book he is to judge, is in the 
hands of a citizen of Lyford or Jedburgh, and gets 
hanged first to be tried afterward. Now the pub- 
lisher of that book has put his money in it. To him 
it is rightfully nothing but a commodity, which he 
has to sell in the worldly interest of the author and 
his own. Should the obscure manikin, w^hodoes the 
reviewing, use his unjust and tremendous opportunity 
and set the public dead against it, the sales are 
blocked, no matter w^hat its merit ; the publisher 
loses his investment, and the author his reward. It 
is a direct injury, base and unwarrantable, to a legiti- 
mate business interest; and, as I have said, I w^onder 
that publishers put up with it. The quality of the 
literary commodity they offer is almost wholly a 
matter of opinion, and I see no equity in an institu- 
tion which is arranged to sacrifice, to the mere 
opinion of a single writer, often venal and oftener 
stupid, the material interests of business men. 
Would any other mercantile or trading enterprise 
think itself fairly served by such organized raiding 
on its rights, or endure the pecuniary loss involved? 
Perhaps, however, logic being logic, this is what we 
must come to. To be consistent, we must see that 
all merchants who have wares to sell, are subjected to 
mendacious 'Miterarv criticism," adorned with such 



100 . ME. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 

rhetorical phrases of defamation as glow in the 
critical essays on Mr. Donnelly's volume. One emi- 
nent journal, with an audience of half a million, will 
keep an assassin who will devote two columns to the 
proposition, fluently and plausibly stated, that a 
respectable grocer, '• through unconscious cerebra- 
tion," offers for sale flour which is full of chalk. 
Another journal as eminent, and as widely circulated, 
will demonstrate in three and a half columns, that 
his coffee is wholly made up of roasted beans, and is 
" valuable only for therapeutic purposes." A third 
authority, widely in vogue, will have four columns 
to assert that being '' unable to distinguish between 
intellectual colors," he confounds the substance of 
the beach with pure Muscovado, and sands his sugar. 
And a fourth, which reaches nearly all the popula- 
tion, will have five columns, to prove that after temper- 
ing the molasses with mucilage and water, he never 
goes up to family prayers, and is considerably worse 
than Colonel Ingersoll. How will the honest grocer 
of the future like such an instituted freedom of the 
press, when it thus decries his goods and hurts his 
business ? But the grocers are safe ; it is onl}^ the 
publishers, — agents for the authors, — for whom the 
case is possible. Miserable anarchist! To think 
that books should have the same right to unimpeded 
sales as groceries! To claim that a publisher's sales 
should not be lessened, nor an author's heart dark- 
ened, by " independent criticism ! " 

Better that books should never be noticed at all — 
better that even fine critics, like Ste. Beuve, like 
Emile Montegut or Paul St. Victor, like Mathew 
Arnold, like George Saintsbury or Professor Minto, 



MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 101 

should break their pens and close their inkstands 
forever — than let continue a literary usage which 
intercepts the reader on his way to the volume, and 
turns him from it by shameful defamation. It is a 
usage which has become general, and has reached 
the dimensions of a serious harm to literature. In 
the case of Mr. Donnelly's important production, for 
one serious and honest estimate, like the just, tem- 
perate, kindly and altogether admirable notice Mr. 
Medill gave it in the Chicago Tvihune^ there have 
been fifty of the worst character. This is about the 
proportion of exception which exists in the infamous 
rule. I think the needed remedy for such a condi- 
tion is to suppress the professional functionary of 
the critical periodicals, with his dogmatic lying 
oracles, and substitute the free cliampions of the 
pro and con. All the reading public wants and 
needs in criticism, is to hear what can be said, the 
stronger the better, both for and against, the 
product of an author's thought or imagination. 
The ideal of a critical journal is a publication which 
shall be an arena for discussion, in which all that 
can be uttered, on every side of a theme, shall be ex- 
pressed on the single condition of proper literary 
ability. A journal governed by such a pi'inciple, is, 
I believe, demanded by the democratic genius of 
this country, and by all interests, including those of 
literature. In every domain of our national intel- 
lectual activity, the one imperative requisite is Light. 
To this, in literature, the present institution of 
reviewing is a fatal barrier. 



THE GREAT CRYPTOGRM 

FRANCIS BACON'S CIPHER IN THE SHAKES- 
PEARE PLAYS. 



lOXATIUS DONNELLY, 

Author of ''Atlantis, Tlie Antedilurian World/' and ''Bagnarok, 
The Aot of Fir € ar.d Grai^L" 



^y E ARL Y all great discoveries have been received with incredu- 
^ iity, and it is not to be wondered at, therefore, that Ignatius 
Donnelly's announcement that he had found a cipher in the 
Shakespeare Plays should have subjected him to unfair attacks 
in the public journals, even though eminent mathematicians, 
after thorough examination, had indorsed his claims. In spite of 
adverse criticism, however, and on its merits alone, Mr. Donnelly's 
great work is steadily gaining in popularity, and eminent men 
everywhere, convinced by his arguments, are gradually creating 
a change in popular opinion. The mere fact that Prof. Elias 
Colbert, in his character as a mathematician, has indorsed the 
cipher, is a sufficient certificate of its validity. The same is true 
of Mr. George Parker Bidder, who is as eminent as he is imbiased, 
ranking, as he does, the first mathematician of England. The 
decisions of th^e men cannot rightly be regarded as opinioris. 
They are the decrees ofscunc^. 



"NO BOOK of modem times has excited so much inrerest all over the 
civilized world as tliis volume, and its sale will probably reach 
a million co'pies,^'— Sew Tori: Morning J ourna.. 

"THE MOST startling announcement that has been hurled at mankind 
since Galileo proclaimed his theory of the earth's motion.**— Aeir 
TorJi World, 

"IT INVOLVES the most interesting literary possibility of our genera- 
tion.'*— Julia ?i Haidhonu. 

*■* I KNOW all about Gov. Donnelly, and I am very sure that he has dis- 
covered all he claims. I am a firm believer in the Baconian theory." 
— BtJiJamin F. Butkr. 

** I SAY without hesitation that I am obUged to endorse the claim made 
by Donnelly that he has found a cipher in some of the Shakespeare 
Plays. » » » xhe cipher is there, as claimed, and he has done 
enough to prove its existenc-e to my satisfaction."— Pyo/. Elias 

C<Abt1-t^ ASTROSOyiKR AND MaTHEMATICL^JN. 



''PHIS extraordinary book has been the subject of so much discussion, 
1 both in Europe and America, that the notices ol it in maji'azines, 
reviews and newspapers would till several volumes. Never has any 
book been so heralded by the curiosity ot the world. 

And this is not to be wondered at. The author has found in the 
Shakespeare Plays a cipher story, curiously infolded in the text, holding 
a certain uniform relation to the pag-ing of the great FoUo of 1623, and 
the beginnings and ends of acts, scenes, etc. 

This work upon which Governor Donnelly has been engaged for so 
many years is now fairly before the world on its merits. His discovery 
is now, and will continue to be, the chief topic ot general discussion 
among educated people. 

The key to the cipher and the text of the secret narrative disclosed 
by it is made public only in*' The Great Cryptogram.'' As to the 
actuality of the cipher," says Governor Donnelly in the Preface of his 
gTeat work, "there can be but one conclusion. A long continuous nar- 
rut ve running through many pa.ges^ detailing historical events in a per- 
fectly sijmnietricaU rhetorical, grammatical manner, and always growing 
out of the same numbers, employed in the same way, and counting from the 
same or similar starting-points, cannot he otherwise than a prearranged 
arithmetical cipher. Let those who would deny this produce a single 
page of a connected story, eliminated by an arithmetical rule from any 
other w^ork ; in fact, let them find five words that will cohere, by acci- 
dent, in due order, in any publication where they were not first placed 
with intent and aforethought. I have never yet been able to find 
three such." 

Governor Donnelly also says : 

"The Key, turned for the first time in the secret wards of the cipher, will yet unlock 
a vast history, nearly as great iu bulk as the Plays themselves, and tell a mighty story of 
one of the greatest and most momentous eras of human history, illuminated by the 
most gifted human being- that has ever dwelt upon the eaith. ***** 

"I have no hesitation in saying that the publication of my book will convince the 
world that these plays are the most marvelous specimens of ingenuity, and mental 
suppleness, and adroitness, to say nothing of genius, power, and attainments, e\er put 
together by the wit of man. There is no parallel for them on earth. There never will be. 
No such man can ever again be born. His coming marked an era in the history of the 
world." 

Apart from the cipher discovery. The Great Cryptogram would, 
by its lacts and arguments, create a revolution in public opinion as to 
the authorship of the Shakespeare Plays. It is a profound and exhaust- 
ive argument, presented in that forcible yet fascinating style for which 
the author is noted. 

The Great ''Cryptogram" Is published in one imperial octavo vol- 
ume of nearly 1,C00 pages. The illustrations include a steel portrait of Lord 
Bacon, from the painting of Van Somer ; portraits of Queen Elizabeth, 
of the Earl of Essex, and of Ben Jonson, and portraits of the leading 
'' Baconians." It contains also a f ac-simile of the famous Shakespeare 
portrait printed as a frontispiece to the great Folio of 1623, and fac- 
similes of the text of that great work, engraved by photographic process 
from a perfect and authentic copy of the same in the Librarj^ of Colum- 
bia College. 

The title and semi-titles are engraved on wood, from original designs, 
in anti<iue style, and the letter-press is from electrotype plates cast from 
new type. 

The work is printed on an extra quality of calendered paper, and 
will be furnished to subscribers at the following prices : 
Plain Edition.— In extra English cloth, stamped in maroon and 

gold, unique design, plain edges $4 50 

Popular Edition.- -In extra English cloth, gold and maroon 

stamping, full gilt edges 6 50 

Library Edition. — In half seal Kussia, burnished edges, gold 

medallion portrait of Lord Bacon on side 6 50 

Presentation Edition.— In full seal Russia, full gilt edges S r>0 

In territory where we have no agent, we will snpi)]y The Ghkat 
Cryptogram at $2.50 in Cloth. Address all ordcis to 

R. S. PEALE & CO., Publishers, 

315-321 WABASH AVENUE, CHICAGO. 



RAGNAROK: 



THE AGE OF FIRE AXD GRAVEL. 



IGNATIUS DONNELLY, 

Author of • 'Atlantis, the Ahtediluviart World, " and ' ^ TJte Great 

Cryphjgrarii : Francis Bacon's Cipher in the 

Shakespeare Plays.''- 



V/ith Illustrations, 



i2mo, Vellum Cloth, $2.00. 



'"T^HE title of this book is taken from the Scandinavian sagro.?, 
1 or legends, and means 'the darkness of the gods.* The 
work consists of a chain of arguments and facts to prove a series 
of extraordinary theories, viz. : That the Drift Age, with its vast 
deposits of clay and gravel, its decomposed rocks, and its great 
rents in the face of the globe, was the result of contact between 
the earth and a comet, and that the Drift-material was brought to 
the earth by the comet ; that man lived on the earth at that time ; 
that he was highly civilized ; that all the human family, with the 
exception of a few persons who saved themselves in caves, perished 
from the same causes which destroyed the mammoth and the 
other pre-glacial animals : that the legends of all the races of the 
world preserve references to and descriptions of this catastrophe : 
that following it came a terrible age of ice and snow, of great 
floods while the clouds were restoring the waters to the sea, and 
an age of darkness while the dense clouds infolded the globe. 
These startling ideas are supported by an array of scientific facts, 
and by legends drawn from all ages and all regions of the earth." 
''Ragxarok" supplies a new theory as to the origin of the 
Glacial Age, coherent in all its parts, plausible, not opposed to 
any of the teachings of modern science, and curiously supported 
by the traditions of mankind. If the theory is true, it will be 
productive of far-reaching consequences ; it will teach us to look 
to cosmical causes for many things on the earth which we have 
heretofore ascribed to telluric causes, and it will revolutionize 
the present science of geology. 



• PRESS OPINIONS • 



•*It is impossible to withhold respect for the ingenious logic and 
industrious scholarship which mark its pages."— Chicago Tribune, 

** This theory is set forth with the dexterity and earnestness 

with which, in a previous work, the author tried to prove the whilom 
existence of the fabled Atlantis, and it is equally certain to rouse the 
curiosity and enchain the attention of a large body of readers."— iV^ew; 
York Sun, 

'' Whatever may be the judgment concerning the scientific value of 
Mr. Donnelly's >Ragnarok,' no one can read it without a thrill of 
excited interest. It has a primeval sensationalism."— Boston Traveler. 

**The work is marvelous if true, and almost equally marvelous if not 
true."— Baltimore Da?/. 

"All is interesting, seemingly plausible, and certainly informing."— 
Boston Commonwealth. 

" Whollj^ interesting, and in some respects as thrilling and as enter- 
taining as the most absorbing romances."— JBosto?i Gazette. 

** The book altogether is, perhaps, the most interesting one of the 
year. ' '— Hartford Tim es . 

*'It is as entertaining and fascinating as a novel."— C/irjstia/i at 
Work. 

**A vast amount of curious information has been gathered into its 
pages."— Cincinnati Gazette. 

**No mere summary can do justice to this extraordinary book, which 
certainly contains many strong arguments against the generally accepted 
theory that all the gigantic phenomena of the Drift were due to the 
action of ice. Whether readers believe Mr. Donnelly or not, they will 
find his book intensely interesting."— T/jc Guardian^ Banbury, England. 

*' It is one of the most x^owerf ul and suggestive books of the day, and 
deserves respectful attention, not only from the general reader but 
from the scientist."— T/jc Continent. 

*'Mr. Donnelly can claim the credit of furnishing a theory which is 
consistent with itself, and, as he evidently thinks, with the scientitic 
requirements of the problem, and also with the teachings of Hoi j- Scrip- 
ture The book is well worth studying. If it is true, it answers 

two very important purposes — the first connected with science, and the 
second with prophec5^ It gives a reasonable account for the tremendous 
changes which the earth has undergone, and it shows how its dissolution, 
so clearly described in St. Peter's Second Epistle, may be accomplished." 
— The Churchman, New York. 

'''RagnakokMs a strong and brilliant literary ])roduction, which 
will command the interest of general readers, and the admiration and 
respect, if not the universal credence, of the conservative and the scien- 
tific."— Professor Alexander AVinchell, in The Dial. 

"In a fCAV sharp, short and decisive chapters the author disposes of 
the theory that the vast phenomena of the ' Drift' could have been pro- 
duced by the action of ice, no matter if the ice swept over the continent. 
His facts and their application are certainly impressive. In fact, liis 
book is very original."— IJart/orcl Times, 

"Mr. Donnelly has presented the scientific world with another nut, 
the cracking of which we confess to an anxiety to see the scientitic 
world attempt."— Philadelphia. Telegram . 

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